I read the first 100 pages of this book before deciding it just isn't for me. I was hoping to learn more about the Japanese internment camps during WWII, but that was only a very small part of the first chunk of the book. In this book we follow two timelines one in the 1980s with Rita looking for her mother, Lily, who has been missing for a few days. Rita is struggling after a divorce and worried about her mother who often has episodes of confusion. In the past story line we do get a glimpse of the camps with Lily as a young girl. We have just begun to learn about Lily's difficult family situation and all the abuse and manipulation she has suffered from every single man in her life. It's a pretty bleak picture.

I am a very empathetic reader generally, but for some reason I was unable to connect or care about either timeline. I found the writing to be a bit choppy and confusing. I felt very distant from the characters and I just couldn't bring myself to want to read further. I gave it 100 pages and decided that was enough. I'm sorry that I cannot recommend this book.

Beautiful story of family and history. While there are difficult issues addressed, it was such an interesting novel about family secrets and the hope of redemption. Such an enjoyable read!

Dundurn and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of After The Bloom. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

60 year old Lily Takemitsu goes missing from her home in Toronto, leaving her daughter Rita to search for her after the police do not seem to take the disappearance seriously. With a history of memory issues, Rita is worried that her mother is wandering around, lost and confused. Her new husband has no knowledge of any issues, nor does her son, putting the burden on Rita to deal with it all. As Rita searches, she ends up delving into the family's secrets, confronting all that took place when her mom was held in a displaced person's camp in California during World War II.

After The Bloom had promise, but there were issues that took away from the story as a whole. The author jumps between Lily in the past and Rita in the present, but often does not delineate between the two. Many times, a sentence or two can go by before the reader is told who is speaking. The descriptions of the problems in the internment camps are on point, but this was not enough to elevate the book. Too much time is spent on Rita's current issues, especially the ones that have no bearing on her missing mother. Additionally, Lily's mental state, both past and present, is not fully explored or explained, leaving readers to fill in the missing details. For these reasons, I would be hesitant to recommend After The Bloom to other readers.

3.5 stars Well I fairly ripped through this one didn't I? Once I started reading, I just had to find out what happened to Lily, and why Rita's mom disappeared. After the Bloom is part mystery (due to figuring out where Lily disappeared to) and of Rita's coming to terms with the state of her family, the nagging mystery about her father and her mother's lifelong distraction and denial about being interned in California during WWII. A very good read, and one I read in just a few sittings.

I have tried at least 4 times to get into this book and it just isn't working for me. I thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Since I never finished it I won't publish a review or rating on public media.

Thank you again

If you enjoy warmhearted, but bittersweet, pieces of historical fiction with sweeping narratives spread out across decades, you will adore Leslie Shimotakahara's After the Bloom. Following two Japanese-Canadian women who hail originally from the United States, Shimotakahara's novel is a thought-provoking examination of war's impact on civilian casualties.

After the Bloom centers on Lily Takemitsu and her adult daughter, Rita, living in Canada in the 1980s. When Lily disappears from her home in Toronto, Rita is busy handling co-parenting as a divorcée. In spite of what the missing woman's husband and daughter know to be true, the police have no reason to suspect that Lily is incapable of making decisions for herself, or that she has been the victim of a crime. Finding her mother falls to Rita, who has grown bitter after years of dealing with her mother's selective forgetfulness and wandering habits.

There is no huge murder mystery to drive After the Bloom. Lily's body doesn't wash up in California, and her husband isn't hiding any murder weapons in his closet. Instead, the bulk of Shimotakahara's novel focuses on Rita's investigation into her mother's past, as she teases out where Lily and her family — which included Rita's biological father and paternal grandfather — were interned during World War II, in a camp where Lily claims never to have lived. From there, After the Bloom shifts to the realities of Lily's life in the fictional Matanzas internment camp — based on the very real Manzanar in Independence, CA — where she meets Kaz, an aspiring photographer who wants to rebel against the camp's hierarchy.

It may not have any dead bodies lying around waiting to be found, but After the Bloom is a lovely debut novel from memoirist Leslie Shimotakahara, who based its events on her own family history. Add it to your TBR today.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

I honestly could tell by the writing of the first 2 chapters that it wouldn't be a good fit for our box and had to put it down. I may read it again in the future!

Thank you to NetGalley and Dundurn for a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I find the stories of the Japanese internment camps to be enlightening and a frightening time in American history. I was really looking forward to reading this book but I found it hard to follow at times. I also found the characters to be lacking somewhat in full character development.

Leslie Shimotakahara’s debut novel gives the reader an insight to Japanese culture, along with the forceful internment of Japanese Americans across America during WWII, which I was not aware at all.
The narration jumps between Daughter Rita Takemitsu and her Mother Lily, giving a full view on plot, while mother and daughter being ignorant on what actually happened/happening in each other’s life. Lily has wandered off again, like always and no one knows where to find her when she doesn’t return. Rita is scared and wants to find her mother. She follows with different acquaintances of her mother, who were complete strangers to her and digs up the story of her mother’s internment and the trauma, instability and family issues which she went through. Rita is finally able to find her mother and reunite with a lighter heart.
Along with Rita’s story, Lily’s story is also put forward which happened to be set in internment camp during WWII. The events were relatively light from other WWII books that I have read, but trauma/abuse doesn’t have a measure. Trauma/Abuse is what it is, no more, no less.
I personally am a little disappointed in the way the story was narrated. The after effect was a little less than I thought I would have. Good plot, variety of characters/setting but narration not up to the mark!

Happy Reading!!

Formatted review available at: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1866907846?book_show_action=false

Toronto, Canada in the 1980s: Three days have passed since anyone has seen Lily. She has always been prone to wandering off, but she usually returns within a few hours. She has never been missing for this long. Her daughter Rita has always resented her eccentric behavior, but Rita would forgive everything if she could just get her mother back. The police say there's no evidence of a crime, so the burden is on Rita to search for clues to her mother's whereabouts. Lily has never been open about her past; in fact, she denies the worst parts ever happened. Rita digs deeper into her mother's history and discovers there's much more to Lily's story—and consequently, her own.

Matanzas Internment Camp, California in the 1940s: Lily has a history of memory problems. She had to dissociate to make it through her horrific childhood. When Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were forced into internment camps during World War II, eighteen-year-old Lily was interred at Matanzas. She falls in love with the rebellious photographer Kaz and becomes close with his father, the camp doctor. She plays a role in the events leading up to the Matanzas Riot because of her desperate need to love and be loved. Torn between love and doing the right thing, her need to retreat into a fantasy world grows stronger. Is Lily even capable of knowing what the truth is?

This story was inspired by the author's own family history. Leslie Shimotakahara is a fourth generation Japanese-Canadian whose grandparents were interned during World War II. Matanzas is a fictional place, but it's loosely based on the actual Manzanar incarceration center. I was glad that I read George Omi's memoir American Yellow right before this book, because it provided helpful context and vocabulary. After the Bloom book features an older character, so it gives more insight into the adult rivalries and resentments. The chapters alternate between Rita and Lily's perspectives. Rita has never had a healthy relationship with her mother. When Lily acts helpless, Rita feels "this cruel, uncontrollable, animalistic urge to tear apart the little world her mother had fabricated out of tissue-paper lies and delusions." Rita manages her time with Lily, because "too much chit-chat would only fill her with irritation or worse yet, that gnawing, empty feeling: they’d never see eye to eye on anything." The differences between them seem unimportant now that Lily is missing. Rita is determined to find her mother. She's also dealing with a recent divorce and insecurity over her six-year-old daughter spending time with her father and his new girlfriend. Lily's chapters cover her time in the internment camp and the shaky rebuilding of her life afterward. Lily chapters are more focused and she's the most interesting of the two characters, but she's difficult to connect to because she's so adrift. Her loose grip on reality and the way she is a supporting character in her own life makes her chapters feel fuzzy around the edges.

Secrets are kept to protect the secret-keeper and those around them, but sometimes knowing the truth can give people perspective and closure. Rita initially mocks the paranoia and conspiracies of her mother's generation, but she realizes their fears are justified when she begins to dig deeper into her mother's past. Men in dark suits were out to get them. Many of their family members werewhisked away in the middle of the night to be interrogated, some of them never to be seen again. Family bonds were dissolved and generational wealth was lost. After they were released from the internment camps, they had to start from nothing in a hostile environment. Rita had experienced prejudice due to her Japanese descent, but she is shocked to hear about the level of discrimination suffered by Japanese-Canadians who are only a decade older than her. She was aware of the internment camps in the United States and Canada, but she had never considered the full extent of what her mother had been through. In context, Lily's idiosyncratic behavior (the well-stocked wallet, extreme frugality) suddenly makes sense. Lily becomes more than just her mother, but also a young woman who came from nothing and raised two children alone. As a young mother and recent divorcée, Rita now realizes what incredible odds Lily faced. With a new understanding of Lily's past, Rita may also come to understand how her family became so dysfunctional and why she and her brother had such different childhoods.

Shame touches everyone in this story.
• As a child, Rita was sometimes ashamed of her heritage and her mother: "It was bad enough being Japanese. ... The last thing she wanted was to be seen as both the Japanese girl and the girl with the crazy mother." Now she is ashamed of her new status as a single mother and her drop in social class.
• Lily feels shame when she realizes how all of the men in her life have used her. It's always been easier for her to tell people what they want to hear and she's ashamed that she remained silent when it mattered the most.
• An entire generation is ashamed. In the internment camps, Lily watched "distinguished men reduced to beasts of burden." When everyone was allowed to return to their lives, many were willing to do anything to assimilate, including hiding their culture:"Forget everything, turn the other cheek. Pull yourself up by your goddamn bootstraps."  Some people were so ashamed of what happened to them that they withdrew from society completely.
• Governments are ashamed of their actions and gloss over shameful events in their history books. The euphemistic view of the internment camps and the government propaganda efforts give those whose rights were never in question a privileged view of what happened: "No one had been comfortable with all those Japs living off the fat of the land anyway while the rest of America had suffered wartime shortages." Rita is frustrated with the concept of the "model minority" and how some community members are exalted as examples of how polite and strong one should be after their rights have been trampled. Anyone who doesn't behave the "correct" way is seen as the problem, rather than the thing they were forced to endure.


The ghosts of the past linger, long after they were thought to have been left behind. Rita and her brother always knew there was something wrong, but they had to pretend not to see it. Because of all the secrets and shame, Rita has to deal with a gaping hole in her family history, as well as a distant relationship with her mother. Both Rita and Lily develop some type of split self to deal with demanding circumstances. In order to move forward, both women need to deal with their pasts. Rita needs to work through her difficult relationship with her mother. Lily needs to deal with her past trauma and guilt. After the Bloom is about the things we do to survive and the things we do to live with ourselves. Do lies for the greater good actually benefit anyone or does it just extend the pain? Many of the characters try to forget the past to protect themselves and those around them. Is it better to forget or does remembering make us whole? No matter how much we might want to forget, the past can never be truly buried. The effects of the past reverberate through generations, whether we recognize it or not.

LINKS 
• Book Trailer
• Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment - Photographs play a key role in the story. Photos can show what actually happened, but they can also be used to show what we want to see. Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange's photos of the internment camps were confiscated by the U.S. military and hidden away in the National Archives until 2006.
• Manazar Riot/Uprising - The Matanzas Riot is loosely based on the 1942 Manazar Riot.
• Driven Underground Years Ago, Japan's 'Hidden Christians' Maintain Faith - History is filled with people deemed as undesirable by their fellow citizens. Rita notices how Lily seems to shield herself with bigotry. It's a reminder that these are not just isolated instances in history and that it's important to look inside ourselves.
• The Redress Movement- A campaign to obtain restitution and an apology for the internment of Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians during World War II.
• The theme of collective amnesia reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant.

This book examines the issues surrounding Japanese internment. I'm always glad to see another internment book on the shelves, because it's a part of history that is often glossed over when it comes to WW2 narratives. That being said, while I didn't dislike the book, I didn't find it particularly riveting either. It's a decent book, and I'm glad it exists.

This book of historical fiction tells a tale of incredible sadness. Lives were ruined by the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII. The author has two narrators, Rita and her mother Lily. Lily's narrative is told in flashbacks to the internment camp. Lily confronts her past and achieves a measure of redemption. Rita learns about a past that she never knew.
Definitely a 4 star book.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for sending me this book..

This is a well written and plotted debut novel of the Japanese American internment experience- written by a Canadian. Shimotakahara has done a nice job of moving the story back and forth between the generations; both Lily and Rita are well fleshed out and sympathetic. The after effects of the internment camp are so deep and so lingering that even late in life Lily can't talk about her life with her daughter. While this isn't a pretty story, it's definitely a cautionary tale about how we can get swept away by fear and do incredibly deep and lingering damage to innocents. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. A good read for fans of historical fiction as well as those who like stories of the mother-daughter relationship.

I could not get through this book and really did not enjoy it, so I will not be reviewing it on Goodreads.

Thankyou so much for the copy of this book, whilst I thought that it was well written and plotted I really struggled to connect and engage with it and was unable to finish it. I really feel this was a personal thing and not an issue with the book itself. Thankyou again for the copy.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased opinion.

When Lily Takemitsu goes missing from her home in 1980s, her daughter, Rita, doesn’t think too much of it. Lily has had a problem of disappearing since her internment during World War II 40 years ago. However, when Lily doesn’t show up after a few hours, as she always has in the past, Rita begins to worry. Rita doesn’t get the help she expects from the police, and Rita’s own search leads her to explore the unanswered questions she has always had about her mom’s time at the Japanese internment camp.

The story jumps back and forth between Rita in the 1980s and Lily in the 1940s. I would have liked to have seen more of what happened in the internment camp. Lily was obviously suffering from some sort of PTSD or mental breakdown because of her experiences in the camp, which made it feel like we only saw a small piece of what went on in there. The novel covered topics that need to be discussed, but the story never really grabbed me.

This was an amazing book about family and love. Incredibly heartwarming, and I look forward to reading more from this author.

Rita Takemitsu is a recently divorced mother, living in Toronto in the mid-1980s. Her daughter is spending the summer with her father in Vancouver, and Rita has the summer off from teaching school, so she is free to wallow in the self-pity she is feeling about the direction her life has taken. That is, until she finds out that her mother Lily has gone missing – and the police aren’t taking the case seriously.

Lily has a history of memory issues and mental breakdowns, which Rita struggled with throughout her childhood. Rita was raised by her grandfather after her father left them, but Lily often confused the two men with each other. When Rita meets with Lily’s newest husband to report her disappearance, she discovers that he knows very little about her past. With little help from the police, and a stepfather that has given up on Lily, Rita decides to start investigating on her own.

Rita finds out that Lily had been attending the meetings of a group that sought reparations for the Japanese internment during World War II – she had been interned in a camp in California when she was eighteen years old. A professor whose father was also interned is helping with the cause, and he and Rita begin working together to track down Lily. The two of them end up getting involved in a very normal, realistic relationship that was one of the highlights of the novel. Although the book moves through history – from Lily’s time at the camp to Rita’s summer in Toronto – I found that the characters in Rita’s section were much more fleshed out and believable.

The mystery of Lily’s disappearance is offset by the literary and historical elements of Lily’s past and Rita’s family drama, especially as she attempts to reconcile her mother to the person she once was. There is also the mystery of who Rita’s father really was – Lily claims that it was Kaz, a man she met at the camp, but as Rita gathers information about her mother, she also learns that her father may have been someone very different. Lily fell in love with Kaz despite the flaws and warning signs, and she seemed to be trying to convince everyone, including herself, that he loved her. Lily lies constantly about her past, but it is not always intentional, as even she does not seem to remember the truth through her confusion.

This novel explores a horrific period of our history (and Canada is included here too) that is often glossed over and ignored. People at the time thought that the interned Japanese were being treated even better than the general public, when in fact they were herded into army barracks and fed just enough to survive. More importantly, their homes, businesses and civil rights were taken from them. Although the sections set in the camp were more historically interesting, I found the modern characters more compelling. Their reconciliation of their parents’ pasts was emotional and intriguing, and a subject that is relevant to all of us today.

I received this book from Dundurn Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Japanese internment camps aren’t something that gets brought up often (if ever) when we look back on American history. If they are, we talk about baseball; after all, when the winners write the history books, it’s easy to paint things over with a bright, happy paint brush. Leslie Shimotakahara explores this idea, and more, in her debut novel, After the Bloom.

Rita Takemitsu, a newly single mother raising her daughter in 1980’s Toronto, doesn’t know much about her family history. She’s never met her father, barely has a relationship with her older brother and, on the day that she has to send her daughter to stay with her ex-husband and his new girlfriend for the first time, Rita’s mother disappears. Meanwhile, Rita’s mother, Lily, is reliving the past she’d never tell her daughter about: her time at an internment camp in California, how she met Rita’s father, and how she ended up in Toronto once the camp was emptied.

Through flashbacks from Lily, the reader is able to see what she lived through—but would never tell her children about—during her time at the internment camp. Rita in her quest to find her mother, however, starts to piece together the truth about her family’s history.

Not only does After the Bloom examine the relationship between mother and daughter—between Rita and her mother, Rita and her daughter—but so too does it shed light on the terrifying reality of an aging parent. Broader still, Shimotakahara takes a hard look at the hypocrisy of a country who prides itself on freedom and acceptance of all people, but an exposure of the darkness born from paranoia.

Part mystery, part literary fiction, part historical fiction, After the Bloom is an important collection of the memories of a dying generation. It is a must-read for everyone.

After the Bloom is a story structured in a commonly used framework - two time periods, two women, a daughter trying to untangle the puzzle of her mother. The broader context is the internment of the Japanese in the United States during World War. The personal story is of a young woman with troubling relationships - her father, her daughter's father, and others she meets at the camp. In this book, the fiction and the history take two different points of focus, making it challenging to engage with.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/05/after-bloom.html

Reviewed for NetGalley