yellowjackets rant time :)

people whining that natalie’s death was “shitty writing” makes me want to bang my head against the wall. like are you seriously shocked that the show about tragedy and murder has tragedy and murder in it. are you seriously shocked that the show about fucked up people has fucked up people in it.

Book review- The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X R Pan!

yes, I am still plugging my bookstagram!

TWs: death by suicide, grief, loss of a loved one, depression, derealisation imagery, insomnia induced hallucinations.

I recently finished buddy reading The Astonishing Color of After with my friend Nat, and I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about it. Before I get into the meat of the review, I just want to say that I know how important a read this can be to a lot of people. I see the value in the story here, it's just that I wasn't able to connect to it emotionally. There was just something slightly off about the whole thing for me and I don't understand why msyelf. I'm going to try and unpack that here a little bit.

So the story starts off when, one night, in the aftermath of her mother's suicide, Leigh (the protagonist) wakes up in the middle of the night to find a large red bird on her doorstep. And it calls to her, in her mother's voice. Leigh doesn't know how or why this is, but she is sure - her mother is a bird now, and she wants to tell her something. So Leigh embarks on a journey, tracing her mother's life through clues the bird leaves her, back to her roots. Back to the Leigh's estranged grandparents. Back to Taiwan.

Essentially, this is a story of grief and identity and love. Leigh learns about her mother and her estranged family's lives, and through their stories, manages to find a place for herself in a world where she's always felt like she never truly belongs. This journey enables her to accept the finality of something so unbelievably earth-shattering as her mother's death, and it helps her process her grief and take steps to move past it.

There is a lot to love about this book, despite my personal feelings towards it. It's very well written, for starters! It has immersive imagery throughout, and it's easy to get lost in Leigh's world. It is also something of a love letter to Taiwan, to Chinese culture, and you can see how much heart went into the writing of it. The parts of the book that are set in Taiwan were just so colourful to read about. They were my favourite parts of the whole story!

The magical realism element in this book is also pretty cool! I love that this is a story told in memories! I love that it places importance in knowing the history of your family - in knowing about your roots, about where you come from. As someone who is pretty clueless about her own family's proper history, this part of the story really filled me with a sense of longing, and it also gave me more perspective about why it was so important to Leigh!

That being said, not everything about this book was so... amazing, to say the least. The one thing I didn't like was the way the characters of Leigh's parents didn't feel fleshed out to me, despite them being really important parts of this story. Leigh's dad was atleast more solid, but her mother - who, arguably, is the prime catalyst for every event in the story - was just very two dimensional. Her character felt reduced to her depression. Which, again, because this was from the perspective of Leigh, I can see how it could have been a deliberate writing choice, but it just didn't read that way to me. And the depiction of her depression did not inspire grief or sadness as much as it inspired depression of its own? I've read a lot of books that deal with mental illnesses and the portrayal in this book left something to be desired. It wasn't that the story portrayed a trigger so much as the story itself was straight up a trigger! Both Nat and I had to take time off multiple times while reading because we both felt very triggered by the way Leigh's mom's illness was depicted.

Another thing that seemed to me to not fit with the story was the sideplot of Leigh and Axel's love story. There wasn't anything wrong with it, per se, but it felt like it diluted the impact of the book as a whole for me. Also, I simply was not invested in the very generic best friends to lovers plotline with very little tension! AND, it was happening in the memories Leigh recalled as well and not in real time, which only reduced my interest in it. Like, I couldn't bring myself to care about Axel and her, I wanted to know more about her mom and her dad and their life!!

I understand that grief is complex, and life does not stop just because your mom has depression or because your family is breaking. I understand that love doesn't stop happening just because something worse or bad is also happening at the same time. That's not how things are. Most of my issues with the book could be argued to be deliberate writing choices to portray this very complexity. And they most probably were. But the reason I feel so disappointed is because the overall intended effect of the book was not achieved, in my opinion. It ended up feeling like a story that lacked focus rather than a story that depicted the complex nature of grief and love.

That being said, I do concede that it is a personal opinion. I've seen some incredible reviews of this book and I know how much it means to a lot of readers. What I'm saying here is in no way diminishing of all those views. I would still recommend this book to you, because, like I said, I still see the value in it. I'm just disappointed that it didn't do for me what it seems to have done for so many others!