If you like: Ghost stories, traveling fiction, Jean Kwok, Turtles All the Way Down, Celeste Ng.
The Astonishing Color of After is a YA book filled with vivid imagery, beautiful writing, and a perfect weaving of magical elements into contemporary storytelling.
Leigh, the Taiwanese-American main character, is a budding artist who feels and experiences things in descriptive colors. Her mother’s voice was a buttery yellow, her mother’s suicide is a garish, crusty red, and Leigh’s resulting grief is sepia dark. Colors tornado around her as the chapters switch from jumps back in time, to the borrowed memories of her parents and grandparents, to her current adventure in Taiwan.
The fantasy and ghost aspects in this story are phenomenal. Shortly after she dies, Leigh’s mother comes to her as a large, red bird and gifts a box for her to take to Taiwan, where Leigh’s estranged grandparents live. While there, Leigh figures out she can use black incense to light her mother’s personal items from the box on fire, and disappear into the memories that are attached to them. Leigh’s struggle is heartbreaking as she grasps for the why of her mother’s death through each and every memory.
Suicide is a tricky subject matter to navigate without glamorizing, or turning into something emotionally contriving. Pan pulls it off with aplomb. She takes time to give the portrayal of depression proper weight, and show that mental illness is never one color or shade. Through the memories we get to see Leigh’s mother in many lights, from peachy joy to muddy despondence and everything in-between.
There are many in-betweens with Leigh’s relationships. The story is largely about family—the dynamics of expectations falling short, acknowledging imperfections, change happening for the better and for the worse, and love sometimes not being enough. I really like the realistic development of Leigh’s rocky relationship with her father, and the exploration of Leigh’s internal struggle as her best friend turns into maybe-something-more.
In the crumpled-up, unfinished suicide note Leigh’s father finds, there is one crossed-out phrase at the bottom for Leigh: I want you to remember
I was mesmerized by Leigh’s journey to find meaning behind that note. By connecting with her grandparents, and subsequently, a culture she never felt she belonged to, Leigh gains new memories while sifting through old ones. Leigh is able to look back and find warmth to combat the cold, and equip herself with the tools she needs to move forward. It’s okay that there are things out of Leigh’s control—that she can’t figure out exactly what the note meant, or what the bird wants.
As a family friend tells Leigh, “Maybe what [your mother] really needs…is just to remember. And to be remembered.”
The Astonishing Color of After made me cry for a lot of different reasons. It’s a heavy read, but beautifully so, and by the end I was full of light and hope.
"The Astonishing Color of After" by Emily X.R. Pan; Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; March 2018.
Comments