The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan

• When her mother commits suicide, Leigh's world shatters.  In the depths of her grief, Leigh believes her mother has been transformed into an enormous red bird who talks to her and brings her clues.
• Trying to put together the pieces of her mother's mysterious early life, Leigh travels to Taiwan to meet her mother's parents, grandparents she has never known and with whom her mother cut off contact after marrying an American and moving to the USA.
• Leigh's present is interwoven with her mother's (and her own) flashback memories to create a bold book full of ghosts, art, culture, and color.

This magical realism-tinged novel that bursts with art and color sheds light on depression and captures the dark corners of grief and the feeling of being pulled between two worlds -- culturally, linguistically, generationally, and romantically. 

Grades 9-12