Eden Mae Lewis is a 14-year-old with a lot on her mind. Her parents moved her to Harford Beach, California, from Texas, so she’s a twangy-voiced new kid in a very insular beach town. Her parents have since separated because her professor father wanted her severely disabled brother, Dex, institutionalized, and her nurse mother refused. Caring for Dex often falls upon Eden’s young shoulders.
As much of an outsider as Eden is, the small town recently grew by two more outsiders—supposedly Russians, an uncle and his mysterious niece—followed by a crime wave of theft, church desecration, and a murdered seal pup. Eden’s determined to get to the bottom of it, but her only friend, Hollis Sweet, thinks she’s jumping to conclusions. Such is the setup for local author Cate Touryan‘s debut novel, Turning Toward Eden.
The novel, released in May, was 25 years in the making, slowed by Touryan’s English bachelor’s and master’s degrees, family (she’s married with two now-adult daughters), law school, and teaching career.
“The writing took second place to raising my children and having a family,” she explained at Scout Coffee on Foothill Boulevard over cold drinks. “I would pick it up and put it back, pick it up, put it back—that kind of thing.”
The process was also slowed by the fact that Touryan aspired to create literature. Though ostensibly billed as a young adult novel, Turning Toward Eden‘s prose is dense and richly detailed, with a nonlinear plotline. It requires a certain amount of close reading, but its rewards are vast: a detailed, immersive world; three-dimensional characters, especially Eden and her complex inner life; a thorny, layered mystery; and a distinctive sense of time and place.
Set in 1971 and located in a fictionalized version of Avila Beach (the author lived in the real Avila when her parents moved to SLO County in 1970), the story unfolds somewhat slowly … until it becomes a relentless page-turner leading up to its intense climax, which is in turn followed by explanatory denouements as the layers of mystery are finally revealed.
Southern Gothic elements mix with that quintessential ’70s California beach vibe, so Turning Toward Eden is unusual to say the least. Think William Faulkner and Eudora Welty mashed up with Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, and Joan Didion.
You can hear Faulkner’s influence in Eden’s inner dialog: “Not much for hearing folks talk, Hollis wasn’t much for talking ’bout folks either, so I kept my musings to myself, swatting at a cloud of flies. And what I was musing was that maybe she was a witch, just like they said. Better a witch than the sister of a half-wit, even if it wasn’t charitable to rumor. And rumor was that we had Soviet spies in our midst.”
The somewhat discordant mash-up can take some getting used to. Eden’s Southern dialect seems out of place in California. But Touryan’s own family is a mixed bag. Her father, who moved the family here to work at Cal Poly, was raised in the South and still has family in Louisiana; her mother was an immigrant from Jerusalem, an Armenian who had never been to the U.S. until she was married. Touryan herself was born in Beirut. As she notes, “truth is stranger than fiction. If it happens in real life, why wouldn’t it happen in [Eden’s] life, right?”
Once you settle into the story’s grooves, it reads like a modern novel with all its complexities.
“You probably notice after reading that it’s not your conventional genre,” Touryan admitted. “It doesn’t have the conventional tropes. It doesn’t go in a linear fashion. So, for me, writing wasn’t about, ‘Let’s just turn out a commercial novel that’s going to hit, just do one like an assembly line, one every six months.’ It’s much more about art for me—creating art—and trying to do something of real significance and merit. So, it was worth it to me to take my time.”
Taking her time paid off. Touryan was thrilled to report that her debut was “named the No. 1 Hot New Release in Teen & Young Adult Historical Mysteries and Thrillers on Amazon. Its broad category is Genre Fiction, Coming of Age—not YA, because it’s a crossover. As of this hour, it is ranked No. 9 on the best-seller list for the YA subcategory.”
In addition to Touryan’s general family dynamics, other elements of her life have also found their way into her work. Her half-brother is disabled and wheelchair-bound like her character Dex. She remembers the Soviet ballet dancer defections of the 1970s, which also play into her novel’s plotline and add to the historical fiction element in her novel. All of her real-life experiences and memories woven into the story lend her book a sense of realism.
“I have no imagination whatsoever,” she joked. “But I’m really drawn to people and their stories. So many other authors are very good at plot, and they see the story arc, and I don’t. I see people. And I see the stories and the ingredients that went into those people, and I’m really intrigued by that. I want to understand how that all came together and why they made the choices they made and how the cause and effect of their choice created the next one.
“I would say that I take a lot of inspiration from people in my life, situations in my life, and then if I have any imagination at all, it’s asking, ‘What was that about?'” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 6, 2025.