Cate Touryan, author of Turning Toward Eden is visiting Ascroft, eh? today.
Tell us about your novel. Is it part of a series? If so, please tell us about the series too.
Turning Toward Eden is a seaside mystery laced with Cold War intrigue. Set in a 1971 California coastal town, it’s a standalone story where rumors shroud the truth like fog across the shore. The crimes are petty at first—a stolen rope, egged cars, hacked flower beds—but soon escalate to bloodshed on the beach. Suspicions fall on an elusive Soviet girl and her uncle, rumored to be Bolshevik spies. When whispers turn toward fourteen-year-old Eden Lewis—newly uprooted from Texas and stuck caring for her disabled brother after her father walks out—she’s forced into a reckless search for the truth. Eden resolves to unmask the mysterious girl behind the mayhem, even if it means risking her brother’s life.
Where did the idea for the mystery that is central to the story come from?
The elusive Soviet character took shape during my high school years in the ’70s, inspired by a shunned, solitary classmate with a Slavic surname. Garbed in theatrical clothes with flowers woven in her hair, she became fodder for outlandish imaginings, including “what if she’s a Soviet spy?”
As do most adolescents, we distrusted “the other,” and had the Cold War tensions not heightened suspicion, our own prejudices would have. She has lingered in my memory since.
Is there a theme or subject that underlies the story? If so, what prompted you to write about it?
I wanted to tell a coming-of-age story where the internal mystery that adolescents try to solve—“Who am I? Where do I belong? What matters most? Is there a God and does he care about me?”—paralleled an external mystery, one that would draw my main character, Eden, out of herself and toward the elusive answers.
Laden with several meanings, the title Turning Toward Eden hints at Eden’s spiritual arc as she sets out to discover who is behind the crimes.
How do you create your characters? Do you have favorite ones? If so, why are you partial to them?
Eden’s severely disabled brother, ten-year-old Dex, was inspired by my own brother, and I’ve dedicated the novel to him as well as to my father—who is nothing like the father in the book. My father devoted himself to my brother’s care until my aging father could no longer tend to boy growing taller than him. All my characters reflect aspects of people I’ve known. Reverend Travers is the best and worst of the various pastors of my youth. When I lived in Avila Beach, a crusty old fisherman used to tell me tales. He became Jake. Eden reflects the once-adolescent in all of us, with a good dose of one daughter’s spunk and another daughter’s introspection and maybe not a little bit of my own youthful chafing.
How do you bring to life the place you are writing about?
In my early twenties, I lived for a year in “Harford Beach,” a fictionalized Avila Beach on California’s central coast. For ten years before that, I lived only minutes away, so all I needed to do was plumb my memories. I still live within ten miles of the coast, so while writing the book, I made frequent trips to Avila, breathing in the smells, imbibing the colors and textures, and then imbuing my descriptions with a retro vibe.
What research do you do to provide background information to help you write the novel?
What I couldn’t remember, I researched in local histories of Avila Beach, and what I couldn’t find in books or online, I gleaned from family and friends—first-hand witnesses of the era and locale.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers about the book?
It’s a genre-buster, or maybe better, a genre-fusion novel—a coming-of-age, historical mystery, a YA-adult crossover, faith informed, but not faith marketed, a touch literary and gilded in Southern gothic. As one reviewer wrote, Turning Toward Eden is “as delightfully enigmatic to classify as Raven [the Soviet girl] is to know.”
A novel that doesn’t fit neatly into a category is often a mystery in itself. I would love to hear from your readers how they might solve that mystery!
Thank you so much for this opportunity to share Eden—and myself—to your lovely readers.
Thank you for answering my questions, Cate, and good luck with Turning Toward Eden.
Readers can learn more about Cate Touryan by visiting the author’s website and her Facebook, and Instagram pages. You can also follow her on Twitter/X.
The novel is available online at Amazon
About Cate Touryan: Cate writes fiction and creative nonfiction that reach for the story beyond the story and the beginning beyond “The End.” Her complex, realistic narratives often touch on themes of faith. While she avoids gratuitous violence and profanity, keeping any romance clean, she does not shy away from portraying the grit and beauty of real life, instead writing the truest story she can, infused with heart and humor. Her fiction will delight young adults and adults still young.
Cate invites you to journey with her into lives both real and imagined, wherein might lie glimpses of your own story beyond the story and an ending redeemed.
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