Book Review: ‘All Our Tomorrows’ by Amy Debellis (near future New York City)
I was immediately captured by the tagline of ‘All Our Tomorrows’ when it promised “sometime in the near future, three Gen Z women ride the throes of late capitalist life in New York City” and at times it struggled to live up to my expectations around that premise, but as a whole, the novel is clever and thoughtful. This debut really surprised me.
In All Our Tomorrows, Janet, Anna, and Gemma lead separate lives, each ground down by the weight of the world they were born into, lost against the dazzling pixelated backdrop of the city. Too young to remember life before the iPhone 4, they think the real world was destroyed long before they were born.
Janet is an underpaid gig therapist who spends her time as a mental health matchmaker, responding to grievance letters from faceless online avatars. Anna is a model-turned-sugar-baby who dissociates during dates with her aging daddy, hoping to save enough not for a Birkin bag, but for the water wars of the near future. And Gemma is a freshman at NYU who aspires to become an influencer, but is so haunted by a recent loss that she can’t even film one video.
Sharp, incisive, and sparkling with dark humor, this is a novel for the age of the doomer generation. DeBellis delivers an unflinching examination of three young lives as they circle closer and closer to the drain of nihilism, climate anxiety, isolation, and grief. All Our Tomorrows is about finding yourself in a broken world, and the small but mighty decisions that can save you from leaking down the drain.
The narration is split between three POVs and we alternate between them pretty evenly, but I quickly came to find Gemma’s narration more interesting. There isn’t a huge amount of plot, it’s mostly character study so identifying and enjoying the characters was pretty essential in enjoyment of the novel. All three of them are varying degrees of desperate for connection, for love, for purpose and for security, in an unstable world on the precipice of change. None of the women are particularly likeable at the start, but they’re very sympathetic and I was cheering for them nonetheless.
I actually think that the most interesting view of Gemma, Janet and Anna was when they finally came together towards the end and we also got to see them as they are viewed by others, all casting their own motivations and experiences on their reception of each other. It reflects all of the things that they’re missing as the first threads of friendship and community form for the three women, weaving them together into a unit that gives the promise of helping them through whatever is to come.
The backdrop to their lives in a near future NYC with climate crisis impending, but it actually rarely played into the plot - these women were entirely too wrapped up in their own lives and heads to think much about the world until a huge protest is announced for Manhattan and a category five hurricane begins to head for the east coast of Florida when Janet’s sister and family live. I expected the climate crisis or some kind of impending apocalypse to be a more significant part of the plot, but without much of a plot at all, it lingered on the horizon in a similar way it does now; waiting and watching for those events that change everything.
‘All Our Tomorrows’ ended with hope and promise, even against the backdrop of a crumbling world. It felt like a beginning rather than an ending and I’m really interested in where Amy Debellis goes next
Thank you to CLASH Books and NetGalley for the review copy.
Written by Sophie
