Leigh’s life has been one of happiness… until her mother commits suicide. When Leigh’s world shifts, she must travel to Taiwan to discover her heritage. This is The Astonishing Color of After review.
“Once you figure out what matters, you’ll figure out how to be brave.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After
Book Title: The Astonishing Color of After
Author: Emily X. R. Pan
Publication Date: 2018
Genres: Young Adult Fiction, Magical Realism
Goodreads Rating: 4.27 Stars
My Rating: 4.5 Stars
Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.
1. Very… different. At first, I was very put off by this novel. The writing seemed choppy, fragmented, overwrought with details, which don’t usually hold my interest. The main character, Leigh, seemed disjointed somehow. Of course, her mother did commit suicide, and she’s dealing with that, so I guess disjointed is expected. But it took me a little while to get into this book.
2. Then they go to Taiwan. In Chapter 13 (which is only page 46), Leigh and her father make the trip to Taiwan to meet her grandparents, and this is where the story gets interesting. The dreams start to make sense. The flashbacks and memories become a bit more recognizable. The backstory, the story of Leigh’s mom, begins to take shape. And in the meantime, Leigh is getting to know her grandparents.
3. A discovery of heritage. If I had to categorize this book, I’d say that the entire story was a focus in figuring out your place in the world, and what role family plays in that place. Before traveling to Taiwan, Leigh didn’t know much about her heritage, her past, her culture. Her mother kept it hidden from her. But through the course of this novel, you begin to see Leigh finding her path and her connection with her grandparents and a new connection to her mother.
4. Why this book? I ranked this book so high because it was SO BEAUTIFUL. Once I got past the choppiness of the language and let myself fall into the story, the wording became more fluid, and I was able to see how it helped the story. Plus, Leigh’s descriptions are so vivid. Everything has a color, and she describes the colors perfectly. She uses color to define her world, and it helped me really visualize what she was seeing.
5. But… her mom is a bird? Ok, there is some weirdness in this book. I hesitate to say this is magical realism, because it doesn’t feel like other magical realism that I’ve read. You just have to suspend reality for a bit, and it will all get cleared up. The hallucinations, the visitations from her mother the bird, and the incense-induced memories tell a beautiful story of love and acceptance and forgiveness.
Leigh’s colorful journey through her past, through her parents’ pasts, and through her grandparents’ pasts help her discover her place.
“There’s no point in wishing. We can’t change anything about the past. We can only remember. We can only move forward.”
“Here is my mother, with wings instead of hands, and feathers instead of hair. Here is my mother, the reddest of brilliant reds, the color of my love and my fear, all of my fiercest feelings trailing after her in the sky like the tail of a comet.”
“Once upon a time we were the standard colors of a rainbow, cheery and certain of ourselves. At some point, we all began to stumble into the in-betweens, the murky colors made dark and complicated by resentment and quiet anger. At some point, my mother slid so off track she sank into hues of gray, a world drawn only in shadows.”
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