All Our Tomorrows
Women’s friendships are at the center of Amy DeBellis’s coming-of-age novel All Our Tomorrows.
In a postpandemic near future, three women of different backgrounds struggle to make their ways in New York City. Janet, a Korean American online therapist, is worn down by her job; Gemma, a British international university student, feels alien in this foreign city; and Anna, a Russian American retail worker, ends up the victim of fraud. Though they are oblivious to each other’s existences, the women have similar struggles: their lives are marred by depression, alienation, problems fitting in, and nihilistic worldviews caused by men who turn out to be other than who they claim to be. Complicated family relations and the fear of impending climate change doom also impact them.
A climate change protest in Manhattan brings Janet, Gemma, and Anna together, though. They end up next to each other in the throng of people. Dinner and drinks afterward marks the start of their fragile friendship, showing them a way out of despair. Still, their intersection comes late in the book and is brief, and the women’s climate change anxiety is of uncertain power: the only action they take is to attend the protest, where they confess that they know little about the topic.
The prose is beautiful and, at times, brilliant. And after the women meet, their individual situations are resolved one by one. Despite their desperate life situations, they secure hope of better futures, which comes with the realization that it is the people who surround them that make life worth living.
A poignant bildungsroman, All Our Tomorrows is about how human relationships are the cure for overwhelming despair.
Reviewed by
Erika Harlitz Kern
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