Reviews with content warning for Body horror - Jutro, jutro i znów jutro

i can’t decide if i enjoyed this or not, lots of it made me mad, lots of it made me cry. all i can say is i couldn’t put it down, for better or for worse.

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wooblatoober's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

i really enjoyed zevin’s ability to portray characters with generosity & portray ever-changing relationships, even with rifts, and just overall make everything feel real.

i’m obsessed with marx’s fruit tree motif. he’s ever-giving, and he’s beautiful, and he’s soft. the love he gives freely is so beautiful and bountiful and juicy and sweet, but not too much so, like a fuyu persimmon. for now, maybe because of my own experiences, i’m more hung up on marx’s death than sam & sadie’s stories and relationship.

zevin does an AMAZING job of showing how people and their relationships change over time. it’s crazy how much my opinions on the characters changed over time, waxing and waning and flipping between them.

specifically, i loved sadie at the beginning and felt sorry for how she was being manipulated, then disliked her toward the end, which isn’t even how every reader might feel about her, since she seems like such a real person, and real people have some people that like them and some people that don’t. conversely, i was a bit annoyed by sam for the beginning, thinking he seemed like any other toxic smart guy who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else, until i started LOVING him toward the middle, then i was a bit annoyed by him again by the end for his lack of communication, though i was proud of his growth and baby steps in communication.

this book reads like creative nonfiction. it’s remarkable. my only small complaint is a major spoiler (everything i’ve marked “spoiler” is a major spoiler though), and that’s basically the end of the book. tl;dr for the spoiler, i felt like the ending was just over the line of a little bit too late in the back-and-forth of the story to feel satisfied by it. i felt empty at the end like i do out of all the best books, but that emptiness came from events that happened before the ending of the book, and the ending was overshadowed by that and felt too little too late.

by sadie and sam’s happy ending, which implies that they’ll fight again in the future but will work to be better to themselves and each other, i was kinda over it. overshadowed by marx’s death, i had become done with sadie’s paralysis and easy-to-anger attitude as well as her ability to hold a grudge that outshines teen sam’s, and done with sam’s refusal to communicate, even if they had experiences or mental illnesses that facilitated those actions (or lack thereof).

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labedzla's review against another edition

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sad tense slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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maziodynes's review against another edition

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dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I read this book fairly quickly, and except for some long tangents of telling rather than showing and some wild word choices, I enjoying the writing. But I found myself on a rollar coaster of "wow this is great, I like this!" to cringing at how badly these characters communicate and how off some of the gaming references are.

It's obvious the game development process stuff was well researched. I found myself really enjoying Marx's perspective as a games producer myself. however, the game dev "lingo" and the games they brought up in context were off or didn't make sense for the time (or even the character's personalities). The author researched game dev history, and design, but it seemed like she didnt actually talk to many developers, and it showed.

The MMO segment at the end was particularly weird from a player perspective - nobody pretends like they arent playing a game unless theres some REALLY stringent RP going on, rare in a full online game unless you have friends you actively slchoose to do it with.

I found any and all mentions of sex in this book to feel far too clinical. It made sense sometimes for Sadie and Sam's over-intellectual povs, but even from Marx who is an emotionally intelligent and loving person, any POV of sex felt completely stripped down of emotion. The scenes felt so impersonal they may have well been omitted, esp when they were one-off sentences of "they had sex." But of course, we get the excruciating physical and emotional details when Sadie is sexually abused by Dov. Make it make sense

This is a personal hangup, but I couldn't get behind was the fact that Sadie kept Dov in her life the entire time. I understood needing to keep the professional relationship for Ichigo, at least at first. But how the is the game that your abuser made your COMFORT GAME? and you're still GETTING BRUNCH with him 10 years later?!? and he gives her that teaching position... it just makes me absolutely sick and soured my perception of Sadie. I wanted to root for her, but between some "not like other girls"-isms and her inability to work on her mental health in any capacity, I just couldn't after a while. And I liked Sam as a character alone, but his obsessive friendship /romantic tension with Sadie was too toxic for me to end up rooting for in the end.

There were some beautiful lines in this book, some sentiments about life and friendship, and my chosen career that truly moved me. but the relationships between the characters ultimately left me wanting more resolution.

Marx was the emotional heart of this book for me in the end. His second-person chapter reduced me to tears. tbh, that chap alone is why I am giving this a 2.75 instead of 2.

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hannah_dv's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

It’s a fun book in being about video-games and the creative process but I do think the author was trying to do too much and seemed to use the book to virtue signal her opinion on every possible issue.

The book has suicide, car-crash, chronic pain, amputation, DV, shooting, death, LGBT violence

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carlafiorenzo's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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avadore's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I found this book so frustrating, I just wanted sam and Sadie to talk, like actually talk, to each other!!! I can't believe such a strong creative partnership could be marred by so many misunderstandings! Also so brutal and violent in a couple of places, really stomach churning and upsetting. The more reflective parts saved it for me, especially the couple of lines about aging right at the end.

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