Book Review: The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This quite possibly may be my favorite book I've read so far this year. I've been thinking about the connections between it and this year's Newbery winner, When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller. Both books deal with issues of loss and grief. In The Astonishing Color of After, Leigh's mother has just died by suicide, and the story focuses on Leigh's grief over the loss of her mother. In When You Trap a Tiger, Lily faces the impending death of her Halmoni and also has the death of her father in her not-too-distant past. The authors present grief realistically and sensitively.

Both books use a magical realism construct that centers and amplifies the girls' experiences. For Leigh, her story begins with her mother's death, and the reader follows her as she struggles through an insomnia-fueled, synesthetically rich, and surreal effort to connect with her mother, who has turned into a large red bird. There are also other magical elements integral to the cultural and physical location of much of the story in Taiwan. When seen through her eyes, these experiences are simultaneously terrifying and beautiful, mundane and magical. Leigh doesn't know quite what is real, and neither do we readers. Lily seemingly has more time to process her grief as her grandmother is ill but alive for most of the novel, but she similarly encounters a giant magical tiger who leads her through a journey of discovery that helps her deal with the former loss of her father as well as with the looming loss of her grandmother. As with Leigh's experience, the reader doesn't so much need to know whether the tiger is "real" as much as to understand that it is very real to Lily.

Both books deftly introduce readers to the experiences of bi-cultural young women in a way that does not pander to white readers but provides an immersion into the experiences of two girls who are an American pre-teen (Lily) and teen (Leigh) but also intrinsically tied to another culture (Lily's maternal family is Korean; Leigh's is Taiwanese). For me, both books provided a rich description of cultures that I feel have often been given only a whitewashed gloss because both authors know what they are talking about and share. Both books also present without a lot of fanfare the tug-of-war sorts of feelings that kids can experience when trying to honor their full selves.

Both books also effectively show the power and destruction that secrets can wield within a family. Ultimately, both books are essentially quest novels, as each young woman strives to unravel the knots of family history created by secret-keeping. When You Trap a Tiger, written for younger readers, is more straightforward in the untangling and progresses chronologically. The Astonishing Color of After tells a more intricately written tale, with Leigh's grief-laden magical experiences in the now tied to meeting her Waipo and Waigong in the immediate aftermath of her mother's death and visiting the places her mother loved in Taiwan interspersed with more realistic fiction style flashbacks to her life in the year leading up to her mother's death.

I particularly liked The Astonishing Color of After. Perhaps because I am an older reader, I appreciated the intricate plotting and the often lyrical text. There were several short chapters that were poetry in all but the formatting. Pan managed to surprise me several times, which happens less frequently the more I read and which I have come to very much value. As soon as I finished, I handed the book to my 15-year-old and demanded that she read it. It is a beautiful and compelling work, and you should read it, too.

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