After Volume One by Anna Todd

*spoiler-free*

After by Anna Todd is about Tessa Young, an innocent girl with a sweet, reliable boyfriend back home, who moves into her freshman dorm and meets Hardin Scott, a typical bad boy who quickly distracts her from everything she knows.

I picked up the graphic novel version of this story and reading in this format really brought the story to life. Having the characters and scenes already visualised helped set the tone and pace for the story. Illustrator Pablo Andres uses a cool art style, and at the end of the book, there’s also a section from Andres going through his steps on the artistic process of the graphic novel from sketches to storyboards to inks and colours. There is also an interesting ‘creating the characters’ section at the end, with a helpful written and visual description of all the characters. It was then fascinating to see how the author and illustrator worked together to create the graphic novel.

The book gets straight into the story where Hardin grabs Tessa’s interest but continuously pushes her away, going between rude and intimidating and then soft and caring. This only entices Tessa more, despite his reckless and confusing behaviour. They go through the same vicious cycle constantly with Tess’s innocent boyfriend Noah being caught in the middle of it. This book has a fast pace, with Tess and Hardin getting intimate early in the story.

There’s a good mix of characters involved in this book, with themes of lust, jealousy and envy evident throughout. Whilst the plot is quite repetitive with Tess and Hardin going between arguing and being close, you do hope the latest argument will be the last one and they’ll make things official. It’s clear why this series is popular as there are a lot of intimate scenes and deals with the typical bad boy trope where the girl hopes she can finally be the one to change him.

I’ve heard mixed reviews with the written books due to its romanticisation of toxic relationships but as a graphic novel, it worked well as the plot wasn’t complicated to convey. I was able to read this in one sitting and with it ending on a cliffhanger I’ll be sure to pick up Volume 2 soon so I can see how the story develops!

4/5 stars