The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan {audiobook review}

The Astonishing Color of After 
by Emily X.R. Pan
♦publisher: Little Brown BYR
♦release date: March 20th, 2018
♦hardcover, 462 pages
♦intended audience: Young adult
♦stand alone
♦source: Audible

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.

{Becky's Review}

There will always be those books, I think, that effect and touch us so immensely that it's just sort of impossible to put thoughts into coherent words for the sake of a review.  I don't come across them often, but when I do?  Amazing, and I immediately set about getting everyone I can to read it, too.  The Astonishing Color of After was one of those rare finds for me. It's taken me a while to start this review, I just can't seem to find the right words, and all the ones I do think of just somehow don't seem adequate: stunning, heartbreaking, sorrowful but healing, thought provoking, emotionally authentic, awe-inspiring. So much more. And speaking of inspiring---it was creativity inspiring, insight inspiring, hunger inspiring (lol), and sparked a definite desire to travel and immerse myself in other cultures, to find out more about my family history, and to tell the people I love how much they mean to me.  Isn't it amazing the things that reading a great story can do to us?

I listened to this one on audiobook, and I highly recommend this route.  There is a lot of mandarin chinese in this book and it is absolutely beautiful to hear it spoken as it's meant to be. The narrator and tone is pitch perfect and I felt like Stephanie Hsu did an amazing job with so many different characters of all ages and sexes and ethnicities. 

Leigh and her best friend, Axel are sharing their first cautious kiss at the same moment her mother is home commiting suicide after a long struggle with depression. While stricken with her grief and guilt, she begins to see a beautiful red crane and convinces herself that the bird is her mother. A chain of events leads her to Taipei, where her mother grew up and where her estranged grandparents still live. On her journey to find the bird, she is led to all of the places that were special to her mother and gets to know her in a way she never had before. Along the way, she learns more about herself as well, how to handle her relationship with Axel, how to fight for her art against her father that doesn't seem to understand her love for it, how to work through her guilt, and how to feel comfortable in her own skin when she feels like she is halfway between two worlds. 

The writing is incredible in this. I loved the way Leigh sees emotions and moments as colors in her artful mind---I seriously want to reread this one, taking note of each color mentioned and looking them all up. Loved that her and Axel were so close that he wouldn't ask her how she was feeling, he would ask her "What color?". (In a side note, see here for something very strange that happened to me when I was listening to this one day. It was pretty amazing!). The things Leigh goes through in her friendships seemed very genuine, very real to every day teen life and I loved that---it was such a great balance to the intense things she was going through with her mother. Her journey and the incredibly detailed descriptions of her experiences in Taipei, the people, the language, the sights, the food (especially the food, such glorious descriptions!)--it all just brought this story to extremely vivid life. There's also a bit of magical realism that adds so much to Leigh's story. I couldn't help but feel every emotion right along side Leigh as the story jumped from past to present bringing her mother's and her own life completely into focus. It's been a while since I both laughed out loud and cried so, so hard at one book. But this one had me by the heart and didn't let go until the last pages and beyond, with the authors very heartfelt afternote. I think it's pretty clear how much I loved this story, and I hope every reader finds time to pick this one up. 

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•ABOUT THE AUTHOR•

Emily X.R. Pan is the New York Times bestselling author of THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER, named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top twelve books of the season. Emily 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. 

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Purchase the book:  Indiebound  •  BookDepository  •  Amazon

Audiobook:  Audible