This book tore me to pieces because of course it did. For me, it was a story of love, art, and the exploration of how these two things cannot be extricated from another. Both Sadie and Sam's character arcs are devastating. Their meeting was pure happenstance and their reintroduction in college was the same. This quiet longing was deeply personal for me. Sadie and Sam have an ambiguous relationship: not just friends, but something more intimate than a romantic relationship. We get glimpses of this intimacy between two friends who know each other well (perhaps too well) throughout the course of this book and their lives.

"The combination of the pre-dawn light and the snow was magical, like being inside a snow globe, a discrete world of their own. Sadie put her arm through Sam’s, and he leaned into her a little. They were tired, but it was an honest tiredness, the kind that comes when you know you have put everything you have into a project. Of course they would finish other games together, and the offices and the staffs on those games would be unimaginably larger. But Sam and Sadie would always remember this morning." (p. 105)
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“'No matter what happens, thank you for making me do this. I love you, Sam. You don’t have to say you love me, too. I know this kind of thing makes you terribly uncomfortable.'
'Terribly,' he said. 'Terribly.' Sam smiled, too wide, showing the huge mouth of crooked teeth that he was so self-conscious about, and he bowed awkwardly. Before he could tell her that he loved her, she was already inside. But he didn’t feel bad that he hadn’t said it. Sam knew that Sadie knew that he loved her. Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye [...] The universe, he felt, was just — or if not just, fair enough. It might take your mother, but it might give you someone else in return. As he rounded Kennedy Street, he began to chant to himself a poem that he had heard once, he wasn’t sure where. “That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.” (p. 106)
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"Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew loved her. People who felt far less for each other said 'love' all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it." (p. 162)

In the same instance, Zevin explores grief, creativity, and reinvention.

From the start, we are hit with difficult points of conversation: Sadie's sister is sick and spends a lot of time in the hospital, so Sadie meets Sam (recovering from a bad injury to his leg and foot) in the hospital and they connect over their love of video games. A friendship kindled in unlikely circumstances and while both characters are young and dealing with inner turmoils of their own (Sam, the death of his mother, and Sadie, the ever-looming potential death of her sister and being neglected by her parents).

"When she’d been retracing the walk she’d taken with him in that promise-filled dawn, she had been struck by how the exact same route could look and feel so different. One minute, Sam was there, the game was completed, and the world was filled with potential. Twelve hours later, Sam was gone, the game was far from her thoughts, and the world was grim and murderous. It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same? For a moment, she felt dangerously untethered from her body and from reality, and she had to sit down to feel the ground beneath her, before she could continue searching for Sam." (p. 141)
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"Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. 'Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here' —she gestured toward her head— 'it’s a haunted house.'” (p. 311)

The exploration of grief is not limited to the early years of their lives, but the tragedies persist throughout the course of the book.

So much death, friendships that grow apart, secrets kept from each other, etc.

We reach a realistic conclusion. It may not be the conventional, storied tale of a happy ending, but it is satisfying in its own way.

Sadie and Sam are not romantically entangled, but they are forever enmeshed in each other's lives. They cannot be disentangled from each other.

I am comforted by Sam's evolution in the end:

"For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did." (p. 384)