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.
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In The Astonishing Color of After, author Emily X. R. Pan tells Leigh’s story in a beautifully-written, powerful way that illustrates the devastating power of grief and loss, and the strength it takes to move forward.
Reality and unreality switch back and forth between chapters, and as you get farther into the story, the line between the two blur more and more. Leigh becomes lost in the memories of her past and the pasts of her mother, father, aunt, and grandparents.
The spiritual part of the book, between discovering her family’s past and chasing the ghost of her mother is breathtaking. She and her best friend and crush, Axel, have this thing where they ask each other what color the other person’s emotions are at that moment, and so throughout the book, Leigh uses this concept to describe her whole world in an array of colors, which makes her grief and her hurt all the more heartbreaking.
Leigh is an artist, and her father never really showed appreciation for her work. His main priority for his daughter’s future is always about grades and test scores, and Leigh’s passion lies in drawing. This made for a really interesting conflict between the two, and I really liked how it was resolved in the end.
The entire story is devastatingly beautiful, and the ending is entirely worth it.
I can’t wait to see what Pan writes next.
