After the Bloom
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A daughter’s search for her mother reveals her family’s past in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.
Lily Takemitsu goes missing from her home in Toronto one luminous summer morning in the mid-1980s. Her daughter, Rita, knows her mother has a history of dissociation and memory problems, which have led her to wander off before. But never has she stayed away so long. Unconvinced the police are taking the case seriously, Rita begins to carry out her own investigation. In the course of searching for her mom, she is forced to confront a labyrinth of secrets surrounding the family’s internment at a camp in the California desert during the Second World War, their postwar immigration to Toronto, and the father she has never known.
Epic in scope, intimate in style, After the Bloom blurs between the present and the ever-present past, beautifully depicting one family’s struggle to face the darker side of its history and find some form of redemption.
Customer Reviews
Engrossing First Novel
A friend recommended this book after her book club read it. I have Japanese American relatives but knew little about their internment. I found Leslie Shimotakahara's novel fascinating, historically informative and suspenseful. Rita's indecisiveness about finding Lilly, her missing Japanese American mother was mirrored in the initial slower pace of the book. The story quickly picked up with flashback chapters of Lilly as a young woman interned at Matanza, a fictitious internment camp in California. The author has skillfully created Lilly's experience surviving harsh, humiliating events and relocating post World War 2 in Toronto, Canada where she endured a disappointing marriage founded on secrets. This novel is beautifully written and well researched.