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.

Okay. I'm not okay. In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.

I went into this book and I never could have imagined how much it would come to mean to me. This book is art and literature in its purest form, leaving me in a pile of tears, drool and emotion days after I finished it. I don’t remember ever feeling so sad and happy, so full of emotion and yet so empty in the same time, after reading a story (maybe The Fault in Our Stars but that was like ages ago).

The Astonishing Color After is featuring fifteen-year-old Leigh Chen Sanders, and the uncovering of her family’s history after tragic events of her mother’s suicide. Leigh’s mother is half-Chinese half-Taiwanese and her father is Irish, but she lives in America, where they met and fell in love. One day, while Leigh was in her best friend’s basement playing video games, her mother took her own life, leaving Leigh with so many questions and unfading feeling of guilt – could have she stopped it if she’d been home? Days after her death, Leigh and her father find a note, and the line I want you to remember won’t leave Leigh’s thoughts. The next night, she sees a beautiful bird calling her in her mother’s voice – and she just knows it’s her. She pursues her father to let her fly to Taiwan to find answers and to remember.

Visiting her mother’s parents – who she never got to meet because of the difficult relationship they had with Dory – she explores things her mother loved and sees her past and life before America. As the forty-ninth day (the day her mother’s soul will leave for good) comes closer, her attempts of finding the bird will become more desperate, but many other things will unravel. Will a story full of love, grief, family, and tragedy be enough to answer the burning questions and help Leigh preserve memories of her mother?

This book is so pure, meaningful and beautiful, but I felt like it wasn’t even trying. It isn’t aspiring to create plot full of tension and activity, but it simply does – I was impatiently waiting for answers and closure to Dory’s story, for an explanation of Leigh’s visions and the bird. This book has amazing pacing and is impossible to put down for its continuity of events. Pan creates strong suspension and sort of mysterious environment around Dory’s past, Leigh’s memories and her relationship with Axel. As I always do, I wanted answers – for the better part of the book I wanted to know why or what or how something happened. The thing is, this book simply does not give those answers or revelations it prepares us for. I would have had a problem with that, because I always have to know everything while reading a book and there can’t be anything left unclear, but this book just gives so much – it provides closure, story of love and loss and grief - and I realized that I didn’t actually need those answers. There were no answers to the questions I was asking, and it was okay with that because this book makes it okay. (sorry I don’t think anyone will be able to understand what I just wrote but it makes sense to me xd)

The author has a story to tell and a message to send, and it does it, perfectly and clearly without hesitation. The entire time while reading this I was in a state of eternal peace and understanding, everything that has happened, I just knew it was supposed to be that way. Pan represents mental illness and the problem of under-acknowledging it or ignoring it. Series of events in Dory’s life combined with depression brought her on the verge of existence, where she lived day after day, not finding joy or love in things she used to.


As the book went on, I realized Dory was battling depression for some time and it was really sad reading about those events from Leigh’s perspective. How her mother slowly withered away, carried by painful memories and the absence of her husband. For the better part of the plot, I was trying to find a reason for her depression, but what this book is trying to say, is there doesn’t have to be a reason. It shows how people with so much love, joy, and life in them can be struck by something so horrible as illness and that they have to be helped.


I really loved Leigh’s character, despite finding her a bit boring from time to time. I think what defined her the most were her relationships with other people in her life – complicated conflict with her father, loving and supporting relationship with her mother and Caro and Axel’s friendships. Storyline around Axel was so amazing, how he seemed unimportant at the beginning, but through retrospectives and Leigh’s changing feelings he ended up as one of the leading factors in her recovery and future. I was rooting so hard for those two and tbh I think I would have died if the book hasn’t ended the way it has :)




*spoilers for ending*
The ending was really beautiful, I didn’t expect that plot twist with Jingling and the bird. This is my first experience with this genre, but I can say I loved it. I don’t mind superficial and things hard to explained, furthermore I thought they were magical.