I wish I would have seen this before reading it. I agree with everything you said, but I ended up the opposite of you. Liking the beginning, hating it by the end
Can we agree that Sadie was somewhat cruel, selfish and completely blind to Sam's feelings about her? It hit hard during the main plot, and the ending was OKyish and expected but still bitter
My journey was a bit different… I liked it… then hated it… then it was ok. I wanted it to be different than it was… and I’m still not really sure how! Appreciate your thoughts on this one!
absolutely agree, I was undecided for a time, then I totally hated. also discovered that I read another from this author and also nothing happened. Great writing nothing to look forward to. I pass.
I agree with the dialogue. It kind of felt like the author just right clicked and looked up synonyms at random and it didn't really flow. I found it extremely pretentious. There are "big" words and there are just words people don't normally use every day. It definitely have gotten better or maybe I got use to it towards the end.
I'm also glad I read it but had problems in general with all the characters. I know people that work in the video game industry but they don't constantly contrast life to games ("in games you can you can keep starting over", "I'm just an NPC"). Every character felt unrealistic.
You know, for the longest time I thought I wanted a story like this. Where the main character doesn't get what he wants, and he realize it's ok, because what he got was just so much better in a way... Now I'm left a little empty. *****SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON OUT DO NOT KEEP READING IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED********* I think the pretentiousness was on purpose. I think a huge part of the beginning had to do with Sadie's immaturity and, well... pretentiousness. Sam was an insanely boring character to me at the start, like I'm sure he was to most people who weren't Sadie. Only through a common interest did she find him endearing and fun to talk to. The dude showed her love and she began to love him back. He eventually became a full on man who realized he didn't have to hide his pain and learned to truly overcome it all. Sadie though.... She was the same person in my honest opinion all the way up until she got pregnant with Marx's child. She was a spoiled rich kid, and while she was unarguably brilliant, because of Sam's inability to communicate due to his trauma she began to resent him the way he resented her so long ago. Because of this, she didn't realize what she had, that seed of love that bloomed as children in a hospital wing turned into a frenzy plant that eventually bloomed roses from the blood of a thrush and the juice of a strawberry. This pretentiousness in the beginning felt blatant, because it's how Sadie was the entire book. The middle and ending sounded much more mature and symbolically significant because it was Sam becoming a man, becoming the person Marx, Dong and Bong, and even Sadie always saw him as. I liked how it felt pretentious. I hated and loved every character equally. Sam for being noncommunicative with basically everyone except for his grandparents but showing he is the most emotionally mature out of all 3 due to his experiences with trauma, pain, and suffering. Marx, for being this goodie 2-shoes Mary Sue who gets the girl and dies a martyr but eventually realizing he was simply living his own life and knew how to appreciate the opportunities given to him. and Sadie, for being an absolute spoiled brat that I could only compare to Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye and for being someone who never gave up on her dreams and desires, no matter what came her way and giving the love she always received back to those around her. I liked this book immensely because every videogame is, to an extent, unfair and flawed... Life is unfair and flawed. Every last one of us have faced unfair circumstances and are faced with our flaws daily. The only thing we can do it to keep working and make time for those who love us. Eventually, we'll find our own big break, our own Ichigo's. I love this book and its characters for that reason. NAH BUT THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO TELL ME DOV PISSED ON HER ONCE BRUH.
I definitely agree I personally loved the world created but disliked the characters. Like it left there was no real emotional attachment between the 3 main characters, it felt very pretentious . Idk whether the author wanted the readers to look at it that way but I felt that their lives were just like game characters ( dependent only on themselves and pretty unidirectional). Yeah this is just my thought and I liked it in the end , the last page really made me feel satisfied and at ease with all the flaws this book had.
wow finally! someone has the same opinion as me! i was so shocked by the fact that everyone loved the book so much that they even cried with it! felt so strange after finishing the book.. and it took me so long to finish it! omg i cant even remember when i started it hehe.. i feel relieved thanks!
Sadie and Sam were both great characters and Gabrielle Zevin clearly knows how to write about trauma. She was really principled in writing their love story as a friendship with all the warts and everything. The character of Marx, as you pointed out, doesn't exist in real life or so appears so rarely, most of us won't meet someone like that in real life.
love this review! Agree with the pretentious writing part as well as the "mine Sadie" parts that just made me pissed as hell 😭 I read the first 70 pages literally last year but I got so tired of it that I gave it up until last week when I was in line on a food truck for a burrito, looked at their menu and saw the most beautiful burrito ever but I was like $10 short. I saw a kid munching on the said burrito and I just stood there thinking of the money i spent to buy this book being $11, I felt like crying so i settled with the regular burrito which was still okay. Read it again out of pure guilt and I just finished it literally 2 minutes ago. I hated it, liked it, and then meh. I still want my $11 back.
I loved the book and didn't find it to be pretentious. It's evocative, emotionally moving and interesting with it's character development. I highly recommend it.
Spoilers here after ........... I think the part where marx was in a coma, was the best written part of the book.Him becoming the bird in the painting was the equavalent of sadie and sam being in the games.Also it was the most sincere and heartwrenching
Had to put this one on my DNF after 35% of the way through. I felt it was pretentious too, and it didn't help that I found Sadie to be unlikable. Looking up spoilers, definitely doesn't become a book for me. They really gloss over a lot of the details of developing a game/company, which I wanted more of, and focus on other parts I didn't enjoy as much.
Your journey was the exact same as mine!!! I'm glad I wasn't the only one that was tortured for the first 100 pages or so. Definitely agree that the hype is super overblown but it turned out alright in the end.
I agree that the beginning was painful, but then it picked up. I also thought the second person was out of place but reasonable for the characters circumstances. The whole book came together and was quite moving.
My journey was: bored than I absolutely loves the plot and it was okay ish at the end. I finished the book hoping when I turn the page I would find a satisfying ending but I was welcomed with the acknowledgements … I came back to the end thinking I missed pages.NO. That was it. I cried at points of the book I’ll give her that she touched parts of my soul but not something I could say like oh wow this was an experience reading !!! NO. The books is okay a 3.7 stars for me for making me cry at points.
I thought Marx was a lot like ferris bueller from ferris buellers day off, where you have a 'perfect' character for all your flawed characters to bounce off of. Having a more interesting fleshed out character might've distracted from the relationship between Sadie and Sam. She kinda acknowledged this by calling Marx boring and a 'Tamer of Horses' and managed to turn that into a plot point.
Wow my reading journey was very similar! I read the first part and put it down for a while, then picked it up later and loved it! That second person chapter actually worked for me and hit me in the feels, so I guess different tastes. I really loved the journey the two main characters went through, honestly the beginning felt less like two pretentious smart kids and more like two autistic-coded teenagers meeting someone with the same hyper fixation for the first time. Their conversations actually feel very similar to my own conversations with my sister about the current topic/book/show we’re obsessing over. But I can see how the author’s over explaining about games can come across as condescending. It may have been an effort to make the book more accessible to audiences who don’t game a lot but went into over explaining.
I thought the way they acted as children was meant to show signs of autism without explicitly saying it. I think this adds to why they bonded because they could understand each other for the first time (when Sadie thinks she can explain her motive for the time sheets as totalling up points) and ultimately why they find comfort in games and obsessed at finding perfect solutions. It’s mentioned Sadie struggled to find other friends as a kid, Alice and her have the fight over the red hat showing some emotional naivety. Sam struggles so much with his emotions as an adult and comes off so blunt and rude (calling Marx his best friend who’s done everything for him boring - yes it’s out of resentment but at this point we know Sadie’s cut him off as this part of his character) & there’s even a part where Sam doesn’t laugh at his grandpas joke (he said it’s because he’s upset but it made me think of it again)
Great review! I was so frustrated by the German as well! It should have been *meine* Sadie, because Sadie is a girl and would have required a feminine ending on the pronoun. I felt similarly to you - glad I read it, quick read, but not a book that will stay with me for a particularly long time. I am currently looking to feel a sense of meaning with the books I choose to read, so it's especially annoying for this book to have fallen so flat.
I will say, about the second-person chapter, I think it’s a way of putting the reader/character in the shoes of a visual novel character so that we ARE the person going through that situation, but in a boring way much like that character in the story lol
I'm German and for it to be the German version of "my Sadie" it would have to be "meine Sadie" and not "mein Sadie" - it needs the "e" at the end to mark the gender.
There were so many unnecessary parts and characters that could have been cut. I agree with all of your critiques. (As unsolicited advice can I just add that your video would be better if you look at the camera lens when you record instead of looking off to the side. As a viewer it feels more engaging when the speaker is "looking at you".)
Gosh the characters were so dislikable (especially Sadie) .There was no real friendship in that book and I felt the pretentious aspect too. I enjoyed the creative art process of the video games tho, it was nice.
I feel exactly like you, pretentious and very fake feeling, like the author herself is the one who pulling the strings of those characters, like author is the director of this poorly designed video game, characters have very strange arch, where a lot of times it doesn't make sense or the setup has completely no impact for the plot, then she try to patch it up with irrelevant anecdotes like ill fitted bug fix update to make up the incoherences. the whole reading experience is painfully incoherent, and characters are mostly not relatable, as for the plot twist felt very stiff.
I enjoyed the book! I saw the "mine Sadie" thing as sort of a transliteration because that particular affect is not uncommon in certain English speaking Jewish populations. I thought the second person was used effectively and with creativity, which I found moving at that moment in the book. I hear you on how it could read as pretentious and unrealistic in the parts where they are children, but it held up for me! I appreciate the critiques and insight though, good to hear something different in reviews.
Bruh u say Marxx was a “cardboard cut out” and his whole point and character arc is that he’s an npc. You say “Freda is German” Freda is not German she was a jew living in Germany. Brother bear are u testing if we read the boook or did u not read it?
I wish I would have seen this before reading it. I agree with everything you said, but I ended up the opposite of you. Liking the beginning, hating it by the end
Can we agree that Sadie was somewhat cruel, selfish and completely blind to Sam's feelings about her? It hit hard during the main plot, and the ending was OKyish and expected but still bitter
Sadie pissed me the efff offffd
It was on the way to being one of my fave books until Sadie just took crazy pills and made Sam out to be the devil incarnate
My journey was a bit different… I liked it… then hated it… then it was ok. I wanted it to be different than it was… and I’m still not really sure how! Appreciate your thoughts on this one!
absolutely agree, I was undecided for a time, then I totally hated. also discovered that I read another from this author and also nothing happened. Great writing nothing to look forward to. I pass.
I agree with the dialogue. It kind of felt like the author just right clicked and looked up synonyms at random and it didn't really flow. I found it extremely pretentious. There are "big" words and there are just words people don't normally use every day. It definitely have gotten better or maybe I got use to it towards the end.
I'm also glad I read it but had problems in general with all the characters. I know people that work in the video game industry but they don't constantly contrast life to games ("in games you can you can keep starting over", "I'm just an NPC"). Every character felt unrealistic.
as someone who contrast life with everything i like and my job (back in the days in my degree), yeah, that’s not an unrealistic feature in someone 😅
You know, for the longest time I thought I wanted a story like this. Where the main character doesn't get what he wants, and he realize it's ok, because what he got was just so much better in a way... Now I'm left a little empty.
*****SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON OUT DO NOT KEEP READING IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED*********
I think the pretentiousness was on purpose. I think a huge part of the beginning had to do with Sadie's immaturity and, well... pretentiousness. Sam was an insanely boring character to me at the start, like I'm sure he was to most people who weren't Sadie. Only through a common interest did she find him endearing and fun to talk to. The dude showed her love and she began to love him back. He eventually became a full on man who realized he didn't have to hide his pain and learned to truly overcome it all. Sadie though.... She was the same person in my honest opinion all the way up until she got pregnant with Marx's child. She was a spoiled rich kid, and while she was unarguably brilliant, because of Sam's inability to communicate due to his trauma she began to resent him the way he resented her so long ago. Because of this, she didn't realize what she had, that seed of love that bloomed as children in a hospital wing turned into a frenzy plant that eventually bloomed roses from the blood of a thrush and the juice of a strawberry. This pretentiousness in the beginning felt blatant, because it's how Sadie was the entire book. The middle and ending sounded much more mature and symbolically significant because it was Sam becoming a man, becoming the person Marx, Dong and Bong, and even Sadie always saw him as. I liked how it felt pretentious. I hated and loved every character equally. Sam for being noncommunicative with basically everyone except for his grandparents but showing he is the most emotionally mature out of all 3 due to his experiences with trauma, pain, and suffering. Marx, for being this goodie 2-shoes Mary Sue who gets the girl and dies a martyr but eventually realizing he was simply living his own life and knew how to appreciate the opportunities given to him. and Sadie, for being an absolute spoiled brat that I could only compare to Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye and for being someone who never gave up on her dreams and desires, no matter what came her way and giving the love she always received back to those around her.
I liked this book immensely because every videogame is, to an extent, unfair and flawed... Life is unfair and flawed. Every last one of us have faced unfair circumstances and are faced with our flaws daily. The only thing we can do it to keep working and make time for those who love us. Eventually, we'll find our own big break, our own Ichigo's. I love this book and its characters for that reason.
NAH BUT THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO TELL ME DOV PISSED ON HER ONCE BRUH.
I’m glad you liked it!! Having a deep connection to a book is what reading is all about:)
I definitely agree
I personally loved the world created but disliked the characters. Like it left there was no real emotional attachment between the 3 main characters, it felt very pretentious .
Idk whether the author wanted the readers to look at it that way but I felt that their lives were just like game characters ( dependent only on themselves and pretty unidirectional). Yeah this is just my thought and I liked it in the end , the last page really made me feel satisfied and at ease with all the flaws this book had.
wow finally! someone has the same opinion as me! i was so shocked by the fact that everyone loved the book so much that they even cried with it! felt so strange after finishing the book.. and it took me so long to finish it! omg i cant even remember when i started it hehe.. i feel relieved thanks!
lol I totally stayed up all night, sobbing all over myself to finish it :)
60% into the book and you feel like its already too long and plotless...by the end I just skipped long parts of the book
Sadie and Sam were both great characters and Gabrielle Zevin clearly knows how to write about trauma. She was really principled in writing their love story as a friendship with all the warts and everything. The character of Marx, as you pointed out, doesn't exist in real life or so appears so rarely, most of us won't meet someone like that in real life.
love this review! Agree with the pretentious writing part as well as the "mine Sadie" parts that just made me pissed as hell 😭 I read the first 70 pages literally last year but I got so tired of it that I gave it up until last week when I was in line on a food truck for a burrito, looked at their menu and saw the most beautiful burrito ever but I was like $10 short. I saw a kid munching on the said burrito and I just stood there thinking of the money i spent to buy this book being $11, I felt like crying so i settled with the regular burrito which was still okay. Read it again out of pure guilt and I just finished it literally 2 minutes ago. I hated it, liked it, and then meh. I still want my $11 back.
I loved the book and didn't find it to be pretentious. It's evocative, emotionally moving and interesting with it's character development. I highly recommend it.
Spoilers here after
...........
I think the part where marx was in a coma, was the best written part of the book.Him becoming the bird in the painting was the equavalent of sadie and sam being in the games.Also it was the most sincere and heartwrenching
Had to put this one on my DNF after 35% of the way through. I felt it was pretentious too, and it didn't help that I found Sadie to be unlikable. Looking up spoilers, definitely doesn't become a book for me. They really gloss over a lot of the details of developing a game/company, which I wanted more of, and focus on other parts I didn't enjoy as much.
Mine sadie is a term of endearment in german, but its written meine Sadie in acutal real german.
Your journey was the exact same as mine!!! I'm glad I wasn't the only one that was tortured for the first 100 pages or so. Definitely agree that the hype is super overblown but it turned out alright in the end.
Great minds think alike!
I agree that the beginning was painful, but then it picked up.
I also thought the second person was out of place but reasonable for the characters circumstances.
The whole book came together and was quite moving.
My journey was: bored than I absolutely loves the plot and it was okay ish at the end. I finished the book hoping when I turn the page I would find a satisfying ending but I was welcomed with the acknowledgements … I came back to the end thinking I missed pages.NO. That was it. I cried at points of the book I’ll give her that she touched parts of my soul but not something I could say like oh wow this was an experience reading !!! NO. The books is okay a 3.7 stars for me for making me cry at points.
I thought Marx was a lot like ferris bueller from ferris buellers day off, where you have a 'perfect' character for all your flawed characters to bounce off of. Having a more interesting fleshed out character might've distracted from the relationship between Sadie and Sam. She kinda acknowledged this by calling Marx boring and a 'Tamer of Horses' and managed to turn that into a plot point.
I definitely agree that there is a pretentious tone throughout the book, I did not enjoy it
Wow my reading journey was very similar! I read the first part and put it down for a while, then picked it up later and loved it! That second person chapter actually worked for me and hit me in the feels, so I guess different tastes.
I really loved the journey the two main characters went through, honestly the beginning felt less like two pretentious smart kids and more like two autistic-coded teenagers meeting someone with the same hyper fixation for the first time. Their conversations actually feel very similar to my own conversations with my sister about the current topic/book/show we’re obsessing over.
But I can see how the author’s over explaining about games can come across as condescending. It may have been an effort to make the book more accessible to audiences who don’t game a lot but went into over explaining.
1: she calls metal gear solid boring (wild take)
2: she spoils the ending to the illiad
I feel like a book that is a couple thousand years old is fair game to spoil.
@@quintessentialish I’m at that part in the Old Testament where it’s starting to rain really hard. No spoilers please!
is a weird opinion to find the stealth genre boring? thats just her opinion, who cares.
I thought the way they acted as children was meant to show signs of autism without explicitly saying it. I think this adds to why they bonded because they could understand each other for the first time (when Sadie thinks she can explain her motive for the time sheets as totalling up points) and ultimately why they find comfort in games and obsessed at finding perfect solutions. It’s mentioned Sadie struggled to find other friends as a kid, Alice and her have the fight over the red hat showing some emotional naivety. Sam struggles so much with his emotions as an adult and comes off so blunt and rude (calling Marx his best friend who’s done everything for him boring - yes it’s out of resentment but at this point we know Sadie’s cut him off as this part of his character) & there’s even a part where Sam doesn’t laugh at his grandpas joke (he said it’s because he’s upset but it made me think of it again)
Great review!
I was so frustrated by the German as well! It should have been *meine* Sadie, because Sadie is a girl and would have required a feminine ending on the pronoun.
I felt similarly to you - glad I read it, quick read, but not a book that will stay with me for a particularly long time. I am currently looking to feel a sense of meaning with the books I choose to read, so it's especially annoying for this book to have fallen so flat.
It was anglicised Yiddish not German.
I will say, about the second-person chapter, I think it’s a way of putting the reader/character in the shoes of a visual novel character so that we ARE the person going through that situation, but in a boring way much like that character in the story lol
I got the feeling this book is a result of intensive marketing meetings and a dozen ghostwriters. Lifeless and heavily planned, no energy.
That's how I felt too. The writing feels stale and clinical
I get why you feel that way. In many ways I did too.
I'm German and for it to be the German version of "my Sadie" it would have to be "meine Sadie" and not "mein Sadie" - it needs the "e" at the end to mark the gender.
Thanks!! I knew something was off
It's Yiddish not German.
There were so many unnecessary parts and characters that could have been cut. I agree with all of your critiques. (As unsolicited advice can I just add that your video would be better if you look at the camera lens when you record instead of looking off to the side. As a viewer it feels more engaging when the speaker is "looking at you".)
Marx was an NPC
I'm sorry I laughed 😂 you right
Gosh the characters were so dislikable (especially Sadie) .There was no real friendship in that book and I felt the pretentious aspect too. I enjoyed the creative art process of the video games tho, it was nice.
Mein = Male, Meine = Female (over simplified but correct in this instance).
It's amazing how people don't know about Yiddish and how it's been anglicised.
Matzo balls, gelfite fish...yada, yada, yada. Whatever.
grandma speaks in Yiddish not German
I agree with you 🙈
That book straight-up sucked. #RealTalk #VoteThirdParty
I feel exactly like you, pretentious and very fake feeling, like the author herself is the one who pulling the strings of those characters, like author is the director of this poorly designed video game, characters have very strange arch, where a lot of times it doesn't make sense or the setup has completely no impact for the plot, then she try to patch it up with irrelevant anecdotes like ill fitted bug fix update to make up the incoherences. the whole reading experience is painfully incoherent, and characters are mostly not relatable, as for the plot twist felt very stiff.
Oh god I hate pretentious books and especially when it focuses on childrens and teenagers.
Better off reading Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys.
Read it, can't remember it.
I enjoyed the book! I saw the "mine Sadie" thing as sort of a transliteration because that particular affect is not uncommon in certain English speaking Jewish populations. I thought the second person was used effectively and with creativity, which I found moving at that moment in the book. I hear you on how it could read as pretentious and unrealistic in the parts where they are children, but it held up for me! I appreciate the critiques and insight though, good to hear something different in reviews.
Thanks for giving your thoughts!!! I would say that while a lot of things didnt work for me, I can easily see how other people would enjoy them!
Great review buddy. Enjoyed it :)
Glad to hear it!
Bruh u say Marxx was a “cardboard cut out” and his whole point and character arc is that he’s an npc. You say “Freda is German” Freda is not German she was a jew living in Germany. Brother bear are u testing if we read the boook or did u not read it?
purposefully boring character does not mean I should care about the boring character
You can be German and Jewish at the same time.
@@toastytowns her being Jewish influences her language as it was Yiddish not German.
Enjoyed the book! The review brought me to the channel!
Thanks man!
Thank YOU
This review is ironically pretentious….
🥸
How???