After the Bloom

A mother-daughter story of a family, focused on the tensions between the two female generations working through the trauma of the internment camps of the Second World War Dramatizes how the internment of Japanese families in the U.S. and Canada has long been a subject of shame rarely spoken of in affected families, and shows how these wounds endure in silence Inspired by the author’s family history. Leslie Shimotakahara is a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian whose older relatives were all interned in Canada or the U.S. The Internment was recently the subject of a Broadway musical, Allegiance, by George Takei The chapters set in 1980s Toronto bring back to life a city that lives in the memories of readers now in their thirties and older — a period of local history that has not yet received a great deal of attention Author earned her Ph.D in English from Brown University in 2006.