Is The Astonishing Color of After suitable for adults, or only teens?

It is classed as young adult, and its prose and narrator are accessible to teenagers. Many adult readers still find it moving, especially if they enjoy literary YA. The themes are mature, though, and the book is best approached as an emotional read rather than a light one, whatever the reader's age.

How does it compare to Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun?

Both books pair grief with a teenager's artistic sensibility and a tangle of first love and family secrets. Pan's book leans more on a cross-cultural, magical-realist search for a missing parent, while Nelson's is more lyrical and romantic in tone. Readers who loved Nelson's emotional intensity will likely find Pan's book a satisfying match.

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The Astonishing Color of After

Name: The Astonishing Color of After
Author: Emily X.R. Pan
ISBN: 9780316464000

by Emily X.R. Pan

Young Adult

Emily X.R. Pan's debut follows a teen who believes her mother became a bird after her suicide, and who searches for her in Taiwan and in the family history she never knew.

What It's About

The novel follows Leigh Chen Sanders, a teenager who is certain that her mother, who died by suicide, has become a bird. Leigh travels to Taiwan to meet the maternal grandparents she has never known, and her search for her mother's spirit becomes a search for the family history her mother left behind. The story is about trying to understand a parent through the people and places she came from.

Pan moves freely between the everyday and the uncanny. Ghostly and folkloric moments sit beside ordinary scenes of a teenager in an unfamiliar country, struggling with a language she only partly speaks and cautiously getting to know a grandmother who is not sure how to reach her. Leigh's attention to color and her interest in art give the prose its texture, and the shifts between past and present keep the pace moving.

Reading it feels like being inside a grieving mind: tender, sometimes funny, often hard. The budding romance with her best friend Axel runs alongside the grief, so the book is less about one loss than about how many different feelings can crowd into the same day. It asks more of the reader's emotions than of their attention, and it rewards patience with the quieter, more uncertain moments.

Read this if you…

want a YA novel about grief that is emotionally direct and does not look away from suicide
enjoy magical realism where the supernatural stays ambiguous and tied to emotion
are interested in stories about mixed-heritage identity and reconnecting with a distant family

Skip it if you…

need a clear, tidy resolution or a plot driven mostly by external events
find grief-heavy stories too painful right now, especially those involving a parent's suicide

Key Ideas

1
Grief as a search for a missing person
Leigh's belief that her mother turned into a bird gives grief a concrete shape. She is looking for someone who may not be findable, and the book takes that search seriously without turning it into a neat lesson. The magical framing lets Pan show how a mind under loss reaches for impossible explanations.
2
Inheritance and the family you did not grow up with
Leigh is half Taiwanese and half white, and she arrives in Taiwan as a near stranger to her maternal relatives. The book explores how identity, language, and history get passed down unevenly, and how a teen can feel both like an outsider and like someone who belongs somewhere she has never lived.
3
Art as a way of seeing and coping
Leigh's artistic habits, especially her attention to color and to making things by hand, shape how she processes what she sees. Pan uses this to show how noticing and creating can help a grieving person stay connected to the world, even when everything feels gray or unreal.
4
Love and loss happening at the same time
The day Leigh kisses Axel is also the day her mother dies, and the novel keeps returning to that collision. It treats first love and devastation as neither cancelling nor explaining each other. The result is a portrait of adolescence in which joy and despair are mixed rather than sequential.

Limitations

Some readers find the magical elements underdeveloped, and the ghostly threads can feel more like atmosphere than a fully worked system. The romance and friendship subplots can compete with the grief story and feel busy at times. The emotional tone is intense and sometimes heavy on lyrical description, which not every reader will enjoy. Because it deals with a parent's suicide directly, readers who are currently grieving should consider whether the subject is right for them.

Questions Readers Ask

Is The Astonishing Color of After suitable for adults, or only teens?: It is classed as young adult, and its prose and narrator are accessible to teenagers. Many adult readers still find it moving, especially if they enjoy literary YA. The themes are mature, though, and the book is best approached as an emotional read rather than a light one, whatever the reader's age.
How does it compare to Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun?: Both books pair grief with a teenager's artistic sensibility and a tangle of first love and family secrets. Pan's book leans more on a cross-cultural, magical-realist search for a missing parent, while Nelson's is more lyrical and romantic in tone. Readers who loved Nelson's emotional intensity will likely find Pan's book a satisfying match.

Published: 2018
ISBN: 9780316464000
Difficulty: beginner
Category: Young Adult

Book details and cover from Google Books.

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