Emily X.R. Pan

"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 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.

The Astonishing Color of After

Ian Brakspear

“You love who you love There's no changing that. You do your loving whenever, wherever you wish"

Hold your finger to the sky with so much force it lengthens like a spine. Look up to the point of it and beyond

There. That tiny patch of the world, no bigger than the tip of your finger. At first glance, it mightjust look like one flat color.

But it's much more complex than that. Squint. See the daubs of lilac. The streak of sage no wider than a hyphen. That butterscotch smear and the faint wash of carnelian. All of them coming together to swirl at the point just above your finger.

Breathe them in. Let them settle in your lungs. Those are the colors of right now.

🎠

We try so hard to make these little time capsules. Memories strung up just so, like holiday lights, casting the perfect glow in the perfect tones. But that picking and choosing what to look at, what to put on display—that’s not the true nature of remembering.

Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again.

To remember is to grieve for the hands that once caressed my face, leaving a trace on my cheeks that were once loved by the departed’s presence.

And I’ll grieve for as long as I remember you.

I’m sick of remembering. Weary of the shadows and storms being tugged to the surface of my mind, mauve spilling into raw umber. Tired of reliving the past, the mistakes.

Once upon a time we were the standard colors of a rainbow, cheery and certain of ourselves. At some point we all began to stumble into the in-betweens, the murky colors made dark and complicated by resentment and quiet anger. 

At some point, my mother slid so off track she sank into hues of gray, a world drawn only in shadows.

“Sisters are very lucky,” Feng says quietly. “They get to be family and they also get to be best friends. Even in the afterlife, I think they recognize the presence of the other better than anyone else.”

Here is my mother, with wings instead of hands, and feathers instead of hair. Here is my mother, the reddest of brilliant reds, the color of my love and my fear, all of my fiercest feelings trailing after her in the sky like the tail of a comet.

Memories that tell a story, if you look hard enough. Because the purpose of memory, I would argue, is to remind us how to live.

The Astonishing Color of After quotes

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