After Review ⭐

‘After’ gives a different meaning to how people view romance. The book emerges an under-explored aspect of romance writing, showing the dark side of love. Throughout the book, one could feel the intense and dark elements of sadness, regrets, hate, and coldness; this gives ‘After’ its characteristic writing.

Romance and Hate

One thing I found interesting with ‘After’ is its duality on hate-romance. At the beginning of the book, you can feel the coldness and hate existing between the main characters, Tessa and Hardin. However, as time progresses, you can feel the subtle warmth of Tessa rubbing off on Hardin. The book creates a balance between the main characters making the subtleness of one character nearly perfectly interject with the coldness of the other character.

As time progresses in ‘After,’ we see the spectrum of the relationship Tessa and Hardin share change from hate to desire and unimaginable love. The direct contradiction and later divergence of each of the main characters’ emotions in ‘After’ gives the book a diverse emotional spectrum.

The Glorification of an Abusive Relationship

Though most people hate to admit this fact, ‘After’ as a book glorifies an abusive relationship. Ever since the creation of the book, both fans, and the author, Anna Todd, has stood by the love Hardin and Tessa share. However, looking from an unbiased perspective, the book mistakes a toxic relationship for a passionate and intense romance novel.

Though love exists between Tessa and Hardin, facing facts will lead us to admit that Hardin Scott was very toxic for most of his relationship with Tessa. Hardin’s coldness and intentional use of words to emotionally destabilize and belittle Tessa shows that their relationship had a high level of abuse and toxicity. Though he also had his share of trauma, Hardin tends to torture Tessa and make her feel she was never enough and in the wrong when he was in the wrong. I found out that even though their toxic relationship was evident, it still added a lot to the plot and the suspense the book emanated.

‘After’ as a Book

Looking deeper at ‘After,’ I will say the book still had many imperfections coursing through its plot.

The first will be poor character descriptions. Though ‘After’ did justice to give a good description of its characters, the book lacked severely in going deeper into its character’s descriptions. Not defining characters further made most of the characters in ‘After’ seem fictitious and unreal. Even the main characters had the same problem as they had no properly defined context from a realistic perspective.

The second issue I had with the book was short and non-detailed sentences. Though the book took place in a formal institution, there was a lack of detailed sentencing that should have projected what each scene wanted to describe. This problem made the sentences in ‘After’ very superficial and unreal.

Another issue I encountered in ‘After’ was the lack of impact other characters had. ‘After’ had many redundant characters whose use could have given the story more detail. The book made some characters completely useless bystanders who only seemed to observe and did not have any effect whatsoever on the plot.

‘After’ and Critics

‘After’ was a massive failure among critics, with the majority of them scoring the book way below average. Though it has garnered over a billion reads, Critics still feel Anna Todd’s novel is not a book worth reading. Most critics had initially gotten issues with the story plot of ‘After,’ and the vague description of events, the lack of control each character had over each other, the book formatting, and the massive lack of detail plaguing the storyline.

Most critics believed that though the book had over 500 pages, the valuable parts couldn’t have exceeded 200 pages making the book long, uninteresting, and empty. Other critics stated the book’s massive success is because it was made out of fandom, saying its lack of technicality suits the hungry fans of the boyband One Direction, who do not need a detailed story structure.

FAQs