Description:
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 stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.
Marité's Book Review:
The Astonishing Color of After paints a imaginatively beautiful story about life, death, and re-birth by entwining all the colors of emotions experienced through grief and the hope that Taiwanese lore offers in their interpretation of rebirth and the after life. Emily X.R. Pan's ability to capture the pain in suffering a loss of a parent was extremely relatable and the emotional turbulence and the chaos that follows as the world one once knew crumbles seemed to be written by someone who has actually experienced that kind of a loss. Something that I very much appreciated as I have never came across a book where a character appeared to know what I had gone through in the aftermath of my Dad's passing. Admittedly, I at first thought Leigh was a brat because she always seemed to be in a bad mood, but upon reflection and further reading I came to the realization that her anger and her frustration were well founded as depression — even if it is not your own — can cause major isolation.
The only thing that I did not quite care about, from someone who knows very little about colors, was how Leigh assigned random colors to express how she is feeling. But, by doing that I found it a little off putting as I could not feel completely immersed in the text as I was always trying to figure out what color she was mentioning and how that may have applied to her mood. Although I may not have been able to appreciate her artistic expression, I believe those who appreciate the arts will really love this book.
Verdict: ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕
Available on Amazon
Available on BarnesandNoble
About the Author:
Emily X.R. Pan currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, but was originally born in the Midwestern United States to immigrant parents from Taiwan. She received her MFA in fiction from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Bodega Magazine, a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at Djerassi, and is co-creator of FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology. Visit Emily online at exrpan.com, and find her on Twitter and Instagram: @exrpan.
The Astonishing Color of After paints a imaginatively beautiful story about life, death, and re-birth by entwining all the colors of emotions experienced through grief and the hope that Taiwanese lore offers in their interpretation of rebirth and the after life. Emily X.R. Pan's ability to capture the pain in suffering a loss of a parent was extremely relatable and the emotional turbulence and the chaos that follows as the world one once knew crumbles seemed to be written by someone who has actually experienced that kind of a loss. Something that I very much appreciated as I have never came across a book where a character appeared to know what I had gone through in the aftermath of my Dad's passing. Admittedly, I at first thought Leigh was a brat because she always seemed to be in a bad mood, but upon reflection and further reading I came to the realization that her anger and her frustration were well founded as depression — even if it is not your own — can cause major isolation.
The only thing that I did not quite care about, from someone who knows very little about colors, was how Leigh assigned random colors to express how she is feeling. But, by doing that I found it a little off putting as I could not feel completely immersed in the text as I was always trying to figure out what color she was mentioning and how that may have applied to her mood. Although I may not have been able to appreciate her artistic expression, I believe those who appreciate the arts will really love this book.
Verdict: ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕
Available on Amazon
Available on BarnesandNoble
About the Author:
Emily X.R. Pan currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, but was originally born in the Midwestern United States to immigrant parents from Taiwan. She received her MFA in fiction from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Bodega Magazine, a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at Djerassi, and is co-creator of FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology. Visit Emily online at exrpan.com, and find her on Twitter and Instagram: @exrpan.
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