The Astonishing Color of After

"My mother is a bird," declares Leigh, a mixed-raced (hun-xie) Taiwanese American teen. She has seen her mother reincarnated as a large red bird and knows that Mom is trying to guide Leigh in understanding the reasons for her tragic suicide. (Leigh also must contend with the crushing guilt of kissing her best friend, Axel, on the day Mom died.) Leigh travels to Taipei to stay with her maternal grandparents, with whom she can barely communicate. There she embarks on a fervent and grief-stricken odyssey riddled with insomnia and confusion, piecing together her mother's past by lighting magical incense sticks that allow her to witness fragments of others' memories. Pan portrays Leigh as a talented visual artist, telling her story with a vividness punctuated by a host of highly specific hues: a "cerise punch" to the gut, "viridian spiraling" thoughts, a heart "bursting with manganese blue and new gamboges yellow and quinacridone rose." Some readers might be put off by the abundant imagery, but it-along with the threads of Taiwanese mysticism and her mingling of ghosts (gui) with the living-creates a hypnotic narrative. roxanne hsu Feldman