The Astonishing Color of After
By: Emily X. R. Pan / Narrated By: Stephanie Hsu
Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
What suicide leaves behind
While The Astonishing Color of After has its many flaws, ultimately it’s an important book, especially for teenagers as they try to navigate through a world of hormones and moods. The Publisher’s Summary lauds it as being stunning and heartbreaking, but I thought it a tad too fraught to be truly heartbreaking: Leigh is a young girl who, on the day she and her best friend, Axel, kiss for the first time, has to deal with the knowledge that her mother committed suicide. She will forever feel the shame of excitement over that kiss and complete and utter despair over her mother’s choice on that same day, at that same hour.
Leigh’s own moods run the gamut between sorrow and rage, and she flies off the handle quite easily, so easily and shamelessly that I kinda sorta lost some of my “feeling” for her. But I wound up brushing off my easy dismissal of her swings of emotion with the thought that with grief comes hypersensitivity, especially if that which causes it is suicide.
Her father too is someone I pretty much had little sympathy for. I understand a character has to start on the low end so that s/he might have room to grow up and to evolve in a positive manner, but he was soooo antagonistic towards Leigh and what were her obvious loves and interests in Life. Sure, by the end there’s hope and growth, but I sure did have a hard time sticking with dear ol’ Dad for quite some time there, especially, as at the beginning it appeared that he dismissed his wife’s INCREDIBLE despair and depression.
There are many revelations, however, as the story progresses, that show that Leigh’s mother’s depression was of loooooong standing and, in such cases, terrible can feel pretty normal. Still, the woman could’ve used a lot more “presence” from her husband.
The writing of the book is really quite beautiful. Myth is interwoven with lots and lots of color as metaphor. And though I was dying for the book to end (After 100 chapters, I kept thinking: Jeez! You still have MORE story to tell? What on earth?!?), it turns out that author Emily X. R. Pan DID have more to tell. Little bits of plot, tiny strands of story and myth had yet to evolve into some lovely imagery. Leigh’s desire to capture her mother, who she believes with her whole heart to be embodied in a large, red bird, is touching, and there’s tension as her chance to hold her mother close starts to slip away with the passing of each day, with the encroachment of a blackness which will swallow her world whole.
Stephanie Hsu does a pretty terrific job with the narration. She manages to pull off teen angst, followed by stern father, followed by confused best friend, followed by Taiwanese grandma. Though she made Leigh shrill when Leigh was pitching fits, and though that made me wanna walk away from the story, I felt Hsu was just being true to the character. Besides, I wound up liking Dad by the end, or understanding him at least, and that could only be brought about by Hsu’s empathetic narration.
So did I LIIIIIIIIKE the book? Sure. Did I LOOOOOOOVE it? Not quite, but I do think teenagers would.
And I very, very much loved that it tackled a pretty heavy subject, suicide, without being overly maudlin and melodramatic. Yes, it was fraught with teen angst, as mentioned, but the gentle swirls of color, followed by some not-so-gentle writing, had me respecting this as a debut novel.
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