Gabrielle Zevin
FICTION Zevin, Gabrielle
Fiction
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts. Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
To cut to the chase, I couldn't put this novel down. It is a research mystery about a family past, which I loved. It is also beautifully written. It is also a novel rooted in truth. There really was a postcard and it was really sent to Anne Berest's mother. And Anne Berest and her mother did conduct this family research. But the fictionalized elements fill in the gap of the history that was erased--the stories of Berest's great-grandparents and great aunt and uncle could not pass down. Their memories were extinguished at Auschwitz If you appreciate the role that novels play in showing you something, "The Postcard" is the novel that encapsulates the idea of inherited trauma. -Anne M