The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

Overview

A Time Magazine 100 Best YA Books of All Time Selection

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 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316464017
Publisher:	Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	03/19/2019
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	37,171
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

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 the NYU Creative Writing Program, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Bodega Magazine, and a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at Djerassi. She is the author of The Astonishing Color of After and An Arrow to the Moon. Visit Emily online at exrpan.com, and find her on Twitter and Instagram:@exrpan.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Astonishing Color of After:A New York Times bestseller
An IndieBound bestseller
Bustle Best of YA Books of 2018
A Paste Magazine Best Young Adult Novel of 2018
Winner of the Walter Honor Award
Winner of the APALA Honor Award
A Reader's Digest Best Books for Teens of All Time

"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

"Magic and mourning, love and loss, secrets kept and secrets revealed all illuminate Emily X.R. Pan's inventive and heart-wrenching debut."—Gayle Forman, bestselling author of If I Stay and I Was Here

"Emily X.R. Pan utterly transported me to a world reminiscent of Isabel Allende. Haunting at every turn, this is a glorious debut."—Renée Ahdieh, bestselling author of The Wrath and the Dawn

"An extraordinary debut from a fiercely talented writer."—Nova Ren Suma, bestselling author of The Walls Around Us

"This beautiful, magical journey through grief made my heart take flight."—Holly Black, bestselling author of The Cruel Prince and The Darkest Part of the Forest

"The Astonishing Color of After works a delicate magic. Its portrayal of grief is deeply felt, and so too is its deliciously tricky romance. I loved this book."—Marie Rutkoski, bestselling author of The Winner's Curse

"My heart has never been more pleasantly devastated. A raw and brilliant debut."—Roshani Chokshi, bestselling author of The Star-Touched Queen

"lyrical and suspenseful"—The New York Times Book Review

"In this dazzling debut, author Emily X.R. Pan has created a spellbinding narrative about love, family, and what it means to grieve."—Bustle

* "Dynamic, brave Leigh emerges vividly in Pan's deft hand, and her enthralling journey through her grief glows with stunning warmth, strength, and resilience."—Booklist, starred review

* "Pan's emotionally charged debut is a compelling exploration of grief and the insidiousness of depression."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

* "Pan's debut novel is not to be missed."—School Library Journal, starred review

* "This novel is as elegant as it is mesmerizing."—VOYA, starred review

* "Pan offers an extraordinary journey that proves real, surreal, and wholly magical."—Shelf Awareness

* "[The novel] pushes the readers' expectations in beautiful and interesting ways."—School Library Connection, starred review

"An evocative novel that captures the uncertain, unmoored feeling of existing between worlds—culturally, linguistically, ethnically, romantically, and existentially—it is also about seeking hope and finding beauty even in one's darkest hours."—Kirkus Reviews

"I am sure I will return to this book every year, just as I am sure that there will always be something new for me to find in its pages."—BookRiot

"In her debut book, Pan communicates what seems many lifetimes of wisdom: the intricacies of grief, how mental illness ripples through families and what it means to find love in the midst of so much loss."—The Daily Beast

"The story is centered on a heart-wrenching mystery, yet Pan's prose is as warm and free-flowing as Waipo's oolong tea, making this story a surprisingly uplifting one."—BookPage

"Emily X.R. Pan beautifully depicts grief in all its complexities: the numbing sadness, the rage, the confusion, and, most hauntingly, the joy."—Bustle.com

"Through Leigh's emotional, illuminating first person narration, Emily X. R. Pan peels back the layers of her grief to expose the heart at the center. The result is a novel as lyrical as it is earnest."—Tor.com

"A hypnotic narrative."—Horn Book

From the Publisher

In her lyrical and suspenseful fantasy novel, The Astonishing Color of After, Emily X. R. Pan explores love, depression and suicide, and the terrible places where those three intersect…The anatomy of any suicide is a painful one for the survivors. But here is where Pan's novel shines most. She never shies away from the awful questions that are left in the wake of such a loss. Who is at fault? Did we love her wrong? How did we fail? But with each flashback and discovery about that long year when she was faling in love—and when her mother was falling apart—what emerges is a story about love with all its limitations and complications, and the story of how a girl and her passions can survive it.

The New York Times Book Review - Meg Medina

★ 01/22/2018
In the wake of her mother’s suicide, 15-year-old Leigh travels from the U.S. to Taiwan, where she hopes to come to terms with the tragedy while getting to know the maternal grandparents she has never met. Convinced that her mother has been reincarnated as a great red bird and eager to understand what happened, Leigh looks for symbols and meaning in the world around her; a stack of incense sticks grants her visions that allow insight into her mother’s past and family history. At the same time, flashbacks illuminate Leigh’s complicated relationship with her best friend Axel, whom she kissed the day her mother died. Pan’s emotionally charged debut is a compelling exploration of grief and the insidiousness of depression. Her narrator, an artist by nature, sees the world through a colorful, complicated lens, and the novel is steeped in its Taiwanese setting. The subtlety and ambiguity of the supernatural elements place this story in the realm of magical realism, full of ghosts and complex feelings and sending an undeniable message about the power of hope and inner strength. Ages 12–up. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/01/2018
Gr 9 Up—Leigh comes home to the unimaginable—her mother, who has always been depressed, has committed suicide. As her grief swells, Leigh believes in her fog that her mother has not died but her mother's spirit has now turned into a vivid bird who brings Leigh gifts, both physical and in the form of memories. Trying to put all the pieces together, her father and Leigh travel to Taiwan, where her mother immigrated from to the United States after meeting Leigh's father. She has never met her mother's family, and does not understand why her mother never spoke to Leigh about her parents or her childhood. Seeking answers for these questions and more, Leigh's father leaves her in Taiwan to stay with her grandparents. The present-day is woven with flashback memories; Pan's writing takes readers on a journey filled with so much emotion, color, and such well-developed characters with a touch of magic, readers will come to the ending drained and fulfilled at the same time. An exploration of grief and what it means to accept a loved one's suicide, this book's lyrical and heart-rending prose invites readers to take flight into their own lives and examine their relationships. VERDICT Pan's debut novel is not to be missed. Give this to fans of magical realism titles and any reader who is battling grief.—Stephanie Charlefour, formerly of Wixom Public Library, MI

School Library Journal

Pan’s sweeping tale of magic, grief, family, and freshman year follows Leigh Chen Sanders to Taiwan in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide. Narrator Stephanie Hsu gives color to the vivid palette Leigh uses to describe senses and emotions. As Leigh bonds with the grandparents she was never allowed to know, she searches for the red bird she believes her mother became. Hsu finds a balance of wonder and anguish as Leigh explores her family’s past through increasingly mystical experiences. Her mother’s struggle with depression is shown realistically in widening spirals full of numbed emotions and chilling thoughts. Leigh and her friends have just the right touches of youthful snark and flattened tones, while Taiwan is full of bright bursts of Mandarin. S.T.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

MAY 2018 - AudioFile

2017-12-06
Grief, regret, and loneliness form the backdrop of a family's life following a suicide, but a path for healing reveals itself in the form of a magical red bird. Fifteen-year-old Leigh Chen Sanders, daughter of an Irish-American sinologist father and a Taiwanese pianist mother, is in love with her best friend, Axel Moreno. The two have much in common: as well as sharing a passion for art, he is half Filipino and half Puerto Rican and also stands out in their racially homogeneous school. However, a rift has opened between them since their first kiss coincided with the day Leigh's mother took her own life. Now left alone with a distant, judgmental father, Leigh is directed by a red bird she is convinced is her mother to visit her estranged grandparents in Taiwan. There, she seeks out places that were meaningful to her mother and uncovers long-hidden family secrets. The Taiwanese setting is enticingly portrayed, and the magical realism of the bird spirit offers transportive flashback journeys into the family's history. The stigma of mental illness and the terrible loneliness of not being accepted form the heart of this emotionally honest tale, but the device of having Leigh express her feelings in terms of color is distracting and adds little to the story. An evocative novel that captures the uncertain, unmoored feeling of existing between worlds—culturally, linguistically, ethnically, romantically, and existentially—it is also about seeking hope and finding beauty even in one's darkest hours. (author's note, resources) (Fiction. 14-18)

Kirkus Review