{ Blogtober 2025 - Day 23 - The Pond Beyond the Forest TLC Book Tour }

About The Pond Beyond the Forest

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Publication date: October 7, 2025

For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a memoir of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her teenage son and save her marriage when she finds herself triggered by memories of her own childhood trauma as he enters adolescence.

At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan’s rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her.

Until it wasn’t.

Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son’s high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family.

In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage.

About the Author

Shigeko Ito grew up in Japan and immigrated to the United States in her twenties to pursue higher education. She studied early childhood development and education, earning a PhD in Education from Stanford University. Drawing on cross-cultural experiences and academic expertise, she explores themes of trauma, resilience, and healing, with a particular focus on childhood emotional neglect. Her writing has appeared on the Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) Foundation blog and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) website. In 2025, she was named a semifinalist in the nonfiction category of the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. She worked for many years at a Montessori preschool and is an avid animal lover, especially of dogs, who enjoys birding, gardening, and raising mason bees. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband of thirty years.

Review Stops

Sunday, October 19th: 100 Pages a Day…Stephanie’s Book Reviews

Monday, October 20th: Instagram: @beastreader

Tuesday, October 21st: 5 Minutes For Books

Wednesday, October 22nd: Instagram: @noladawnreads

Thursday, October 23rd: Diary of a Stay at Home Mom

Monday, October 27th: Instagram: @littlefoot_books

Tuesday, October 28th: Instagram: @dealingwithbooks

Thursday, October 30th: Instagram: @spaceonthebookcase

Monday, November 3rd: Instagram: @kristis_literary_corner

Wednesday, November 5th: Instagram: @girlmama_and_books

My review:

 

While not the usual book I read, mainly because I tend to not want to delve into difficult and heavy subjects, I often grab one of these stories that will grip my heart and pull me in, and leave me rooting for the writer.

 

We all have difficult lives and every one of us has encountered grief, trauma, anger, disappointment and heartache.

 

Shigeko Ito grew up in a family not exactly loving.  A father who was often away from home, a mother who was a narcissist and didn't show love the way Shigeko would have wanted or expected.  It was a hard, difficult, often lonely childhood that led to a mental break at the young age of 17 years old, and a stay in a mental hospital.  When she has the opportunity to move to California as an exchange student, she takes it.

 

It was a hard, sad story to read and at times I wanted so much to reach in, grab her out of the book and just hug her.  Tell her that she is amazing, she is loved, she is wanted, and she deserves to have a good life.  

 

The book shifts between her childhood and the current life, decades later when she has moved to the USA for good, got married, and had a son.  

 

Because of the non caring way her parents treated her growing up, she becomes a helicopter mom, sometimes almost stifling of her son's upbringing.  What Shigeko doesn't understand at first, is how the way she was treated as a child, is now projecting itself into the way she deals with her husband, her son and life in general.

 

Shigeko's story is one of hard work, pain, sadness, a willingness to overcome, to understand and to not repeat her parents choices.  Beautifully written and haunting in many ways.

 

Thank you to TLC Book Tours and She Writes Press for the review copy.  All thoughts and impressions are mine.