The Astonishing Color of After

The Astonishing Color of After, published in 2018, is Emily X.R. Pan’s APALA Honor Award and Walter Honor Award-winning debut young adult fantasy novel. Pan was raised in Illinois by her Taiwanese and Chinese American parents, and closely collaborated with her extended family in Taiwan while researching and writing the novel. Although the novel is not explicitly autobiographical, certain details like Leigh being the only child of a professor and a piano teacher echo the facts of Pan’s own early life. Moreover, Pan also lost a family member to suicide and has witnessed firsthand the effects of depression. In the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, Pan emphasizes that “it was important to me that while Leigh’s mother had experienced some terrible things in her life, there wasn’t a reason to explain her having depression” (465).

The novel was widely praised in the media for its treatment of difficult emotional subjects. Critic Meg Medina applauds Pan’s interrogation of “how and why […] we remember events,” as well as her courage in addressing “the awful questions” of who is to blame for a parent’s suicide. (Medina, Meg. “Dark Magic and Other Escapes in These Summer YA Novels.