Book Reviews

After

Author: imaginator1D
Genre: Fanfiction ( One Direction ), Romance
Sequels: After 2, After 3.
Completed
Synopsis:
Tessa Young is an 18 year old college student with a simple life, excellent grades, and a sweet boyfriend. She always has things planned out ahead of time, until she meets a rude boy named Harry, with too many tattoos and piercings who shatters her plans.

Review:

After. Probably the most popular fanfic out there, or at least the most heard of. With every other fanfic with even the vaguest similarity being branded as a rip off, what makes people read this?

I have no fucking clue.

The story starts off with this really prudish main character, Theresa ' Tessa' Young, who is in her first year of college. She is probably the worst female lead ever. She never sticks up for herself and when she does it's usually for something really stupid. Her English is really old fashioned. She always says "you are" not "you're." Contractions don't exist in her world, which is ironic considering she's majoring in English literature. She's OCD to the extent where I think she's planned her great grandchildren's funerals. I'm exaggerating of course but it comes close. She's way too overly trusting and despite all of this she's got a boyfriend named Noah. Her problem is only a problem because it affects her stereotyped dream that every woman wants.

Harry is introduced around now and his character has no shame. Like none. He makes innuendos all the damn time. It's like he's made for only s*x and nothing else. He's quite smart as he's got a job and studies ( surprise surprise ) in Tessa's English literature class and even reads classics like Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, yet hides behind the stereotypical bad boy persona, etcetera etcetera. He goes to all the frat parties, has way too many one night stands to remember, but surprisingly has some standards. Just a few like " Don't enter my room " or "Touch her and I'll kill you"

You don't even have to guess what happens to Noah, or what Harry's past was like. This is the fanfiction which picked up what Dark started and made it mainstream in a way that you couldn't escape on Wattpad.

The plot is quite genius in the beginning and makes up (not completely) for the bad leads. The twist is unexpected when it's revealed because it's so his character. You don't suspect for a minute it might be... whatever it is because you think it was his plan from the get go. The trilogy loses half of the interesting bits in the second book and by the third book it's clear she didn't plan to write that much and screwed it up, or she just couldn't find a way to wrap the whole thing up and she still screwed it up. It really helps that you don't even know what's going on half the time. 😒. The plots for the sequels are so different from the first book, like Anna decided to make this as bad as possible for Tessa.

The other characters are just as strange. Aside from the leads she's only properly written a few (Liam,
Karen, Anne etc), and the others just seem like they're there to help the plot go along or something (Richard, Danielle, Christian etc.) Tessa and Harry's relationships with all of these other characters is the focus when they're not getting their Ariana on and just-

*cough* Moving on!

The worst bit though, which is really peevish since it's written quite well, is the fact that they can't make up their damn minds and fight over the same thing every time, and even if they don't fight they just.... 💥 (😉) then they break up and/or make up and guess what they do? (Hint: 💥) . They know it's wrong and that they shouldn't do it but we didn't know Harry's secretly Adam Levine so we're blessed with the power to see their animals take them over to the dark side leading to more intricately detailed scenes depicting coitus I didn't need to see. Just make them talk it out like proper adults already.

The book becomes strange when you realize a 20+ year old married woman with a child wrote this. Like don't you have a life? A child? Does your husband mind your dark fantasies of Harry when you're lawfully married to him? The world will never know.

All this aside, this is a really nice book in its own right and the first two books have even been published as After & After We Collided, and apparently they're sold everywhere, just in case you need your fix of literary porn.

(Side note: The names in the published version just make no sense (because of copyright and all that). Harry Styles is Hardin Scott, Niall is Nate, and Zayn is Zed like WTF?)

I would recommend this as a book to read to just test the waters of your limits with sex scenes (some of the other books I'm going to review will have way more detail), romance and just fanfiction in general.

DO NOT, however, judge ALL fanfiction and ALL romance books on Wattpad based on this.This isn't even that good. There are plenty way better, so don't give up on the whole topic because you didn't like one book.

Hopefully I didn't spoil too much if you haven't read it and it's a trip down memory lane for those who have.

Happy Reading!
Sai 😊

A/N I kinda spoke about all of the books as a series than just After. If you can't find something I mentioned in here in the first book that's probably why.
But either way #Hessa four-ever 😉😉 (see what I did there?)