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.