I had high hopes for this book and really wanted to like it and enjoy it but I'm afraid it fell flat in my eyes. I like that it is setting, 'Autumn of 1949, two women convene in the parlour of a Melbourne hotel' and the premise of of the story of Mary and Tess but found it just didn't flow well and the story for me became a bit muddled.

All in all an okay book for me but not one I would rave about. I just think with a bit of rework and editing it would make a better story.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House Australia for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

This was very underwhelming. I appreciate that the author was telling the story of her own family but, in doing so, she centred the voices of the Australian occupiers. Mary starts to challenge her beliefs about the Japanese but then suddenly leaves and the book becomes about something else all together. I didn’t like the characters, I didn’t like the white saviourism, there wasn’t much plot and I didn’t care how it ended. The writing was decent and it’s always interesting to learn about a time in history I didn’t know about.

“War had come, the scene seemed to say, and then, just as suddenly, it departed.” The Occupation follows the path of Mary Egan, a young Melbourne woman, who escapes the confines of family and gender to be part of the occupation of Japan in the Hiroshima prefecture. I guess Mary could be forgiven for finding this level of freedom intoxicating being the role women were relegated to in 1949, as the latter part of the book makes abundantly clear. However she looks wilfully naive and callous with respect to the Japanese people, the role of occupiers, and even toward Sully, the man she dates while she’s there. I understand Mary is drowned in propaganda: “The opening passage laid out their mission – they must help the Japanese make themselves worthy to stand beside the peoples of the civilised world.” However, I wanted to ask why Chloe Adams was telling this woman’s story?

What does Mary bring to our understanding of ‘The Occupation’? For me it’s that Australian women were callous little twits more interested in getting laid and landing husbands. Mary making up stories about Nancy, a Japanese women who was right in front of her rather than actually establishing a genuine friendship with them was a good example. Mary also judges her friends for how they look as they go on picnics and attend dances, but never turns that lens on herself. I found her an unsatisfying character who didn’t really cast a lens on the events. I wanted to hear more about the situation of Japanese women.

Take my review with a grain of salt, I don’t usually read historical fiction, but I picked this up because I do like women’s stories and I am interested in the impact of occupation on the Japanese national character. Maybe historical fiction isn’t meant to be critical or make you think. This just made me wish I was reading Sully’s story because he connected with Japanese people, and changed as a result of that knowledge: “She’s not a character in a storybook, Mare.” Perhaps that in itself is a comment on gender... once you're pregnant in a time period that shames and oppresses unmarried pregnant women, maybe you aren't allowed the room to grow about anything but what's happening within?

1948. Mary Egan is from Melbourne and she travels by ship to the Japanese city of Kure as part of the provisional emancipation force. At the camp Mary shares a room with Noreen and Ida, and works in YWCA or the Dew Drop Inn, serving food and in their time off they explore the countryside, go on picnics and attend dances.

Mary finds it hard to comprehend that only three years ago the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on the nearby city of Hiroshima, and she’s believes they did the right thing, it ended the war and saved the lives of our soldiers and including one of her brothers.

Mary meets Sullivan Darling or Sully a reporter and journalist, and he explains it killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians, in a horrendous and cruel way and they have no idea of lasting consequences?

I received a copy of The Occupation by Chloe Adams from NetGalley and Penguin Random House Australia in exchange for an unbiased review.

The narrative highlights many things, including Australia’s attitude towards to Japanese at the time and it wasn’t good due to what happened to our POW’s. I had no idea women were send to the country to help the emancipation force, they could drive to Hiroshima and look at where the bomb was dropped, and no safety precautions were taken and buy a souvenir (the ladies had to be escorted by men), and the attitudes towards and how unplanned pregnancies were dealt with.

I’ve never read a post-World War Two book like this before, Chloe Adams debut novel sheds light on both sides of the Pacific conflict and the aftermath in an enlightening and understanding way, and I highly recommend for fans of At the Food of the Cherry Tree by Alli Parker.

Four and a half stars from me and I can't wait to see what Ms Adams writes next.

Chloe Adams has said that the heart of her novel The Occupation is a family story, an ‘unexamined shadow’ that she feels liberating to tell. Mary escapes a comfortable but constrained life in suburban Melbourne to work as a nurse in post war Japan. This opens Mary’s world. The platitudes she has absorbed about the Japanese people are no longer comfortable as she forms friendships and witnesses their suffering. She also embarks on a passionate love affair with Sully, a journalist. The cruel attitudes to unplanned pregnancy are also poignantly explored. I found I came to really care for Mary. The small stories in the margins of the mainstream war narratives are so interesting and important.