Of course Zevin isn’t the only writer who’s ever improved their craft by returning to the same creative well time and again throughout their career. On the contrary, while fans of her more recent adult work seem, on the whole, to be surprised by the innovative emotional and formal somersaulting of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (out this week from Knopf Doubleday), anyone who’s at all versed in her YA work will immediately understand that everything she took such big teen-oriented swings at a dozen years ago-not just emotional themes and character types, but also temporally interwoven narrative devices, a deep interest in how people grow and change from childhood to old age, and an playfully circular theory of life-she’s pulled together into one expansive world with the emotional wallop of a tale that is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. To be clear: I am not running Paste readers through Zevin’s imaginative YA past on a lark, or as an exercise in filling digital space. And in All These Things I’ve Done (2011) and its two Birthright sequels (2012, 2013), she used a dystopian future in which chocolate and coffee are illegal and American democracy is even more fucked than it is today to imagine the life, loves, and losses of a sixteen-year-old crime boss, as recollected to her grandchildren by said crime boss’s elderly future self.
In Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (2007), she used a combination of a coin flip and retrograde amnesia (that old soap opera chestnut) to imagine what a second chance at high school might look like, in all its complex angst.
In Elsewhere (2005), she imagined an afterlife where you live your years in reverse, from the age of your death all the way back to infancy, at which point you’re returned to the “real” world to try your hand at the whole life thing all over again. Fikry and Young Jane Young, she was taking some of the most interesting swings in the late-aughts Young Adult scene. Before Gabrielle Zevin captured the hearts (and plaudits) of the adult contemporary market with The Storied Life of A.
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