A stunning, heartbreaking debut novel about grief, love, and family, perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson and Celeste Ng. 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 … 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.
“Emily X.R. Pan’s brilliantly crafted, harrowing first novel portrays the vast spectrum of love and grief with heart-wrenching beauty and candor. This is a very special book.”–John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down
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Emily X.R. Pan’s brilliantly crafted, harrowing first novel portrays the vast spectrum of love and grief with heart-wrenching beauty and candor. This is a very special book.
A beautifully descriptive story of loss and familial bonds . Relatable as I’ve experienced the loss of my mother and I suffer from depression. Gorgeous cover and rated 5*. A favorite for sure.
WOW! When I picked this book up to read I was not expecting such an inspirational, deep, emotion centered book. The way the author links colors with feelings and emotions is incredible, easily creating a picture in your head. A teenage girl loses her mother to suicide, leaving her dad and her in despair, shock, and grief. All the mother left was a note, half scribbled out, and what was left said, “I want you to remember.” So she goes across the world to try to find signs of her mother, and clues to what she’s supposed to remember. This is a book of family, grief, emotion, and love.
Going into this book. I wanted to give this book a good chance. And though I really enjoyed it. Some parts I was kinda like didn’t need to be there. Like the parts where the main character was thinking of her friend in another way. Just after her mother death. But I get it she is a young girl. Having all kinds of things going on. Other then that I really enjoyed this book. The colors being described so much didn’t bother me so much. Like it did other people who have read this book. I took has how are you feeling but turned into colors. I highly recommend this book. It does go by fairly quickly because the chapters are so short. And it goes from past to present and she is learning about where she came from and things she realized.
About Book-
This book is about a young girl Leigh Chen Sanders who recently her mother has passed away to suicide Oh she is learning how to dealt with her mother’s death. Figure out why was her mother so down what happened. Was it her fault or her fathers for always traveling for work and not being around. We see Leigh go from present to past a lot in this story. I really enjoyed it because we could see how her mother was. Leigh also started to believe that her mother had turned into a bird yo show her daughter things and to remember things too. Leigh learns that her mother parents are still alive and goes and visits them after the passing. Leigh learns a lot about them and her parents. In the end I really enjoyed this book. And sometimes when someone does kills them self’s we don’t know. But we try and Figure out way. Again beautiful and sad story but a good book to read.
This was a beautifully written story about grief after suicide. While weaving in magical elements it takes you in the past and back into the present as Leigh begins to discover her mother’s story and through this her own story as well. I felt that while on this journey Leigh grew closer to her father and she also seemed to find herself again after losing her mother. A story that will break your heart and then mend it back together by the end.
I really loved this book. Although I tend to read more horror and supernatural, my agent suggested I read this for its emotional core and she was right to recommend. The flashbacks and periods told in the past were done really well and weaved into the story at just the right times. The magical realism aspect was intriguing and added such depth and mystery to the book. I loved that the main character had synaesthesia and saw her emotions in colour. I also have synaesthesia and see words in coluor, so it added a deeper experience for me. The subject matter is obviously quite hard to read about but I felt the author handled it sensitively and there was hope and a future at the end, which all YA books should contain. I highly recommend!
Touching account of a teenage American girl dealing with her mother’s depressing, and her Chinese family she’s never met. Coming of age, going home, ghosts, magical realism, and more.
At the beginning of the story, I was impatient for things to escalate. But when they did, I was so glad that I continued to read it. This book is amazing, and will blow your fuzzy socks off the first time around!
It was not what I expected. It was recommended by a friend. Issues of coming of age and first love, tragic loss and grieving, looking inside and outside the parameters of possibilities. Expanding ideas and understandings and being astonished by where that can take you.
What did I just read?? What magic was this?? So intense, so beautifully written, I love the language of art and music and pain and love. Leigh is such an amazing character, complex and young and hurting and growing. Her time in Taiwan is so intense and fascinating and filled with wonder and other….yeah this was pretty much amazing in every way.
It gave me all the feels. So wonderfully written and descriptive, I felt like I was there.
Loved so much about this novel, I don’t know where to start. The writing is truly astonishing. It’s full of imagination, creativity, spirituality and so much more. It’s a joyous ride through cultures and canvases, through losses and gains, and the kind of love that transcends time and place. I will hold this book in my heart forever.
This book is about loss, depression, suicide, first love, family and finally hope….
Although the storyline is very interesting I almost dnfed a couple of times, the heroine was just annoying, I mean I understand where she’s coming from but still sometimes she was so selfish and rude…
Anyway if you like contemporary young adult maybe you should give this a try.
What an amazing and heart-wrenching book! I’m really glad I picked it up. It ties in cultural significance with the accuracy of feeling like an in-between girl straddling two worlds.
I love how real the novel gets about grief and the ways we have to process it. Sometimes the imagery is so fantastical, and there’s a very poetic feel about the whole novel. You just have to enjoy the beauty of it all.
I also thought the romance was a cute side plot. Though I figured out what the main issue was pretty much in the beginning, I liked getting trapped again in the ambiguity of the teenage years.
The only minor drawback I found was all the mentions of colors, which became overloaded to me.
A solid book that explores despair and family ties.
This is the story of Leigh Sanders. Her mother has died from suicide and now Leigh is lost. One day, she sees a bird, and she is sure it is her mother. Her father, unsure what to do now that his wife is gone and his daughter seems lost, takes Leigh to Taiwan to meet her grandparents for the first time. Leigh feels this will give her a chance to find her mother and speak to her grandmother. She discovers that her grandparents speak very little English, and that the relationship between her parents and them is strained.
Her dad finds he cannot stay in Taiwan, but feels Leigh should stay. Leigh is determined to find her mother and chases after her memories in all corners of Tiawan. She meets a young girl, Phong, who helps her translate with her grandparents and also find what Leigh is looking for – closure.
The story goes back and forth between Leigh in Taiwan, and the recent past of her time in the United States. Leigh is an artist. She has submitted a portfolio to a special program for talented high school students, but her father was not pleased. He wants Leigh to concentrate on something “real” That art is just a past time. But for Leigh it is everthing.
She has a best friend, Axel, who she is secretly in love with. Axel is whom she leaned on when her mother died, but an awkward situation before she left for Taiwan is making it difficult for her to reach out to him while she is gone.
With the flash back parts of this book, we discover more about Leigh’s family and her relationship with her mom and her grandparents and what lead to her eventual suicide.
In the end, Leigh finds what she is looking for, but not in the way she imagined. She is now able to leave Taiwan and move forward. Through a tale of magical realism, Leigh and her family are brought to life.
This book was excellent. It is going to the top of my list for this year. Just incredible. The story was well told, and the writing was beautiful. I was drawn to the characters and even though magical realism is usually not my favorite but this book blew me away. The author did a good job of mixing in Leigh’s past and present and mixing in the magic elements with true to life problems that many people face when a loved one dies.
There is a lesson in this story, of course. She talks a lot about depression, especially in the end, about how important it is to listen to the people in our lives and to pay attention to signs when we think someone might be in trouble.
You need to read this one. Or listen to it. I did find that this book was well told with a voice attached to the characters.
“The purpose of memory is to remind us how to live”
Magical, emotional, eloquent, and touching book.
A wonderful story about loss, depression, and life after death. Pan does a great job addressing the issue of mixed cultures, identity, ancestry, depression, and family. I think there is a lot to be said about the main character Leigh as she struggles to understand her mother’s depression and ultimate suicide. Her relationship with her father is less than stellar and she knows almost nothing about her mother’s parents and heritage. I love how she learns about her mother’s life, her grandparents, and all the things her mother hid from her. Leigh also struggled with being American and half Taiwanese. I see why people had so many great things to say about this book.
I didn’t love this book. There are a lot of things that were really great, but I personally struggled to connect with Leigh and often thought she was being a brat. I didn’t hold that against her because she was grieving and angry. I think her journey in this book was a truly great thing to experience.
A lyrically fractured portrait of a teenager’s journey through grief, longing, and forgiveness.
Uniquely told.
It sagged a bit for me around the 3/4 mark, however the ending made it all worthwhile.
Truly an astonishingly creative work. Not just a book, but an experience. I haven’t been so immersed in a character’s psyche since reading Camus’ “The Strange” some twenty years ago, and I haven’t read a novel this beautifully rendered since “The Commoner” by John Burnham Schwartz.
BTW: I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator, Stephanie Hsu, was as incredible as the words she gave voice to. I haven’t experienced a narrator that good since Harry Potter. I also bought the physical book (after the audiobook) because I liked it that much…that’s saying something!
CW: suicide, attempted suicide, depression, grief, micro-aggressions
This book was a wonder! It’s a luminous exploration of grief, taking place after Leigh’s mother dies by suicide.
Leigh both knows and doesn’t know about her mother’s depression. Kids, especially teens, notice so much more than we ever think they do. So, of course, she knows when her mom is having a bad day but her parents never address it with her and she’s even sent away during the worst of it, literally shut out from her family. Not talking about depression and suicide only makes the stigma worse and it is no wonder Leigh does not know how to relate to anyone afterward. The #ownvoices review from Hannah at PostGradReads pointed out how the stigma is especially prevalent in the Asian community and the way the story explored this through Leigh, who is biracial with a Chinese mom and white dad.
Instead, she comes to believe her mother is a bird. She believes the bird is giving her a message, that there’s something her mother is trying to convey. There’s an element of magical realism but at the same time, I wondered if it was a specific manifestation of her grief. Leigh has insomnia and barely sleeps in the weeks after her mother’s death and sleep deprivation can do very fun things to our understanding of reality. I loved how this was explored through the bird and through her time in Taiwan visiting the maternal grandparents she never knew.
There’s rich symbolism throughout the book, from the bird to the cicada—both the lone cicadas Leigh sees in Taiwan and her mom’s necklace. Leigh is an artist so she also attaches meaning and emotions to specific colors. Some people might feel this is a tad overdone but it worked for me. Although, I used to be hugely into art myself so it may be a specific way I related to Leigh. (Beyond sharing the same first name, that is. There have been so few instances of a main character with my name, the only other book I can recall is from my childhood and it was a boy named Leigh…the joys of a unisex name.)
I hated that Leigh’s parents never told her about what happened with her maternal grandparents or the truth about her mom’s depression. I also hated how her dad wouldn’t support her art, how he conflated her mother’s situation with his daughter when they were such different people. It’s more evidence of why we need to talk about depression. But there was such beauty in the evolution of Leigh’s relationship with her dad, such relief when they finally do start talking about the things that matter.
I really appreciated how the bulk of the story takes place in Taiwan and the way she feels out of place there is contrasted with the flashbacks to the times she felt out of place back home. The way her mom did not encourage her to learn Chinese is on full display as she’s very limited in being able to communicate with her grandparents and this hampers her ability to learn the truth about what happened to sever their relationship with her mom, as well as figure out where the bird-mom is and what Leigh needs to learn from it.
Even though this grapples with heavy subjects, it’s also interwoven with lighter moments of connection and belonging. The flashbacks also center around Leigh’s best friend Axel and their burgeoning love story and I adored all of the uncertainty and unknowns of going from friends to something more. I loved every part of this reading experience and look forward to whatever Pan brings us next.
This was a unique look into the world of somebody who has been affected by mental illness. Leigh is a great narrator who sees the world with an artist’s eye. The constant mention of colors to describe attitude and emotion kept me enthralled.
This book deals with Depression, Suicide, and Grief in a gentle, yet passionate whirl of colors. Emotion is soaked into every chapter, along with the confusion of a sudden, unexpected loss. As I have Bipolar Disorder, I know that the struggle is real. This was a book I needed to read. It helps me to see through another lens, to see it from the outside.
‘The Astonishing Color of After’ is a heartbreaking, yet beautiful book. Soaked in color, dripping with pain and confusion, this read will help to delve deeper into what mental illness is, as well as, hopefully, break apart some of the stigma.