We can’t quit shitty books.
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Marines: Hello friends! Funny story, I first wrote (most of) this recap in February of 2015. Here, I’ll quote you the original opening for posterity’s sake:
It was always our intention to pick up another book to snark in 2015, but I’ve got to admit that having so many of you hanging around the Fifty Shades reviews recently made me really miss that project. I mean, not any of the actual words written in the book… except for maybe “floor the pedal to the medal” and “my mother was a crack whore, Anastasia. Now go to sleep.” Point is: I’m really excited to start a new book! Remind me of this down the line, okay?
We realize that anything we do next won’t be Fifty Shades, because chances are your mom, grandma, hair dresser and random lady on the train aren’t reading it. However, we figure it can still be fun to snark a thing that people like and ask ourselves that important question: why?
Enter After.
Basically, I knew that After was a thing I wanted to get to, but then E.L. James announced Grey and then we started doing the Twilight books because of the 10 year anniversary and After got pushed to the side. We aren’t done with Twilight yet, but we are taking a break between Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, so I figured now was a good a time as any to start recapping this mess.
I’ll be joined by the lovely as always Samantha, who also recaps Supergirl, Pretty Little Liars and Designated Survivor.
Samantha: I’m excited because, aside from Goosebumps, I’ve never recapped a book before! Lets see how long the novelty lasts!
Mari: I can almost guarantee the writing quality will be about equal.
Here’s a heads up about posting schedule, though we know how schedules go around here usually: the plan is to post 2 recaps a day on Tuesdays. You will hear about this non-stop, but the chapters (at least all the ones I’ve read so far) are RIDICULOUSLY short. Instead of piling up a couple chapters in one recap (and ruining my thumbnails and post naming system…), we are just gonna post two recaps back to back and call it a day.
And the final thing before we begin, let me share with you what I know about After:
- It was published as One Direction fanfiction on wattpad.
- A lot of people read it.
- Simon and Schsuter went, “YES. THIS.” and bought it, though Anna Todd had to pretend it wasn’t about 1D.
- If her Twitter account is to be trusted, Anna Todd is a regular ball of sunshine.
- The film rights have already been acquired.
- imaginator1D is only a slight improvement over the username snow queens icedragon.
Samantha: Okay, I literally didn’t know any of these things before reading Mari’s handy dandy list. And I just lost 20 minutes down an Anna Todd twitter rabbit hole.
Mari: So, with all of that in mind, here we go!
We start with a prologue I’m almost certain will prove to be completely unnecessary. The narrator tells us that college is a BFD in her family. Her mother put a lot of pressure on her to attend the (fictional) Washington Central University. UGH, this is set in Washington too?? Is it down the street from sparkling vampires and around the corner from flaming douchebags? WHAT IS IT ABOUT WASHINGTON?
I’m pretty sure we have a few readers in Washington, so:
Samantha: Okay, I Googled “why Washington” and the first hit is choosewashingtonstate.com. Maybe they know?
Mari: Someone knows something.
I’m joking– we all know it’s because Stephenie Meyer started it.
Anyway, narrator girl who hasn’t been introduced at all says that college turned out to be so much more than she bargained for.
“I had no idea that there would be so much more to college than academics. I had no idea that choosing which electives to take during my first semester would seem, just a few months later, like trivial affairs.”
Apart from being a super awkward couple of sentences, I’m already confused by Unnamed Narrator’s confusion. She’s seems to be really surprised that there would be other people at her college and she would have to interact with them? She tells us that meeting her dorm-mate was awkward and dorm-mate’s friends are all wild. She’s again confused, this time by their “inattention to structure.”
Alas, she becomes part of the college madness.
Samantha: Within two sentences she goes from “Talking and understanding typical college kids is the worst and hard” to “But I completely joined in and became one of them.”
Mari: And because there were already 2 paragraphs without a mention of a booooy, we get to the point: and that’s when he crept into my heart.
“He” is Hardin, and he changed her life in “ridiculous plotline” ways. Her words, not mine. For real.
She isn’t sure if she regrets meeting him, despite all the pain he’s caused her, because passion and stuff. Her life has never been the same since Hardin crashed into it.
Thank you, useless prologue. Why did we need to hear the entire premise of the book before we started it?
Chapter One. Our protagonist is named Tessa. She’s awake, in bed, and waiting for her alarm to go off. There is this bit of build-up about how this is the most important day in her entire 18 years of life. We read the prologue, though, so we know she’s going to college. Her mom calls her name from downstairs. Tessa makes her bed for the last time, and it’s all very dramatic.
Tessa tells us (again) that she’s been preparing for college for forever, all while her peers were “hanging out, drinking and doing whatever else it is teenagers do to get themselves in trouble.” She doesn’t even know what those things might be, because to make these love stories work to their full extent, the girls must be naive, pure, virginal and saint-like. At the beginning of this book, Tessa doesn’t even know how to get into trouble.
Samantha: Basically, “she’s not like the other girls.”
Mari: Lovely.
So, anyway, Tessa got into college, in case you hadn’t heard, and her mom is very happy about that. She tells us about her shower in which she stands under the water, stressing out for so long that she runs out of hot water and can only shave her legs from the knee down. True and actual detail.
Tessa finishes getting dressed and there is such a weird combination of details going on right now. For instance, she puts on a dress, but doesn’t tell us what the dress looks like. She does tell us that she grabs her favorite sweater, but notices a tear in the sleeve, so she puts it back. We get more detail about the thing she’s not wearing than the one she is wearing…?
Samantha: It’s so, so weird. Her mother insisted she wear “the thing” so I guess I’m just imagining a green blob dress.
Mari: Head canon accepted.
Tessa has a boyfriend named Noah, who is younger than she is, really smart and probably going to get dumped. Sorry, bro.
He’s waiting downstairs for Tessa, all blue eyes, gelled hair and “perfectly lined smile.” I don’t know what that means, but I’d like to imagine that Noah is wearing lip-liner. The official movie doesn’t have a cast yet, but Anna Todd released a “cast list” when she wrote her fan-fic. She said Noah is played by Zach Roerig, so here. A visual:
Samantha: He’s beautiful.
Mari: Thank you.
Noah seems really nice, what with his smiling and lip liner and all. Tessa tells us that he sometimes wears too much cologne, though, so we don’t feel bad later when she almost certainly dumps him. I hope you end up with a sweet side character no one cares about either, Noah.
Tessa puts her dirty blonde hair into a ponytail but her mom is all, “no. We’ll wait until you fix that.” Because ponytails are the worst, as the first chapter of Fifty Shades of Grey taught us. Wait, did Bella wear a ponytail? (S: I think Bells rocked a sad ponytail with her khaki’s, A LOT.)
Noah carries Tessa’s bags into the car while she combs her hair again. She’s really nervous about college, and I don’t know if she’s mentioned that yet, so I thought I’d include it here. She goes outside, ready for her two-hour road-trip and wondering if she will make any new friends at college.
Samantha: We also get the detail that “the thing” dress is GRAY. So, firstly goodbye to my green blob head canon and also oh god please not that word.
Mari: And on that note: The end.
That was phenomenally dull. I’m a little scared we’ll just end up talking about how boring this book is, but I promise to at least keep Paint drawing on the characters. We can always look forward to that.
Next time on After: Tessa meets her roommate and the rude boy she will inevitably fall for in Chapter 2.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
I'm a 28 year old graduated English major and almost librarian. I can often be found singing too loudly (poorly) in the car or spending some time (hours) on Tumblr. I am a lover of Harry Potter, the Spice Girls, and too many other things.