Author Interview

Author interview: Emma Tourtelot on motherhood, grief, and becoming a novelist

Mandy Webster

Emma Tourtelot brings a rare mix of cultural fluency, emotional candor, and lived experience to her work. In this interview, Tourtelot reflects on motherhood as a creative throughline, her early-morning writing life, and the surprising rewards of seeing readers truly live inside her words, as she discusses her debut novel, No One You Know.

Emma Tourtelot’s debut novel, No One You Know, released January 20, 2026.

Q: What’s a memory of a story or book that made you realize you wanted to be a writer?
A: I grew up one town over from Roald Dahl–in Buckinghamshire, England–so I got to meet him at our local library when I was a kid. He was just as weird and wonderful as his stories. And so tall! (I just looked it up: He was 6’6”.) I read his books over and over, and I loved hearing about his little writing shed in his back garden. That was the first time I really thought about who was behind the stories I loved. My favorite was always James and the Giant Peach.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth: Obsession, family loyalty, and the danger of loving too much

Mandy Webster

Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth is a gothic, psychologically rich literary novel that burrows under your skin and stays there. Set in 1965 in the quietly watchful town of Ballycrea, the story opens with the arrival of the O’Leary siblings, whose carefully guarded past and tightly bound loyalty to one another immediately raise questions no one is quite asking out loud.

Get your copy of Heap Earth Upon It from my independent online bookstore today!

Following her acclaimed novel Sunburn, Howarth once again writes with precision and restraint, layering unease rather than rushing toward easy answers. At its heart, this is a novel about grief and survival, and about what happens when sibling devotion turns inward and begins to do real harm. The O’Learys have lost their parents and, in the absence of any other safety net, have clung to one another so fiercely that none of them are truly allowed to grow.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Pōhaku by Jasmin Iolani Hakes: An epic, indigenous saga about land, memory, and survival

Mandy Webster

Jasmin Iolani Hakes’s The Pōhaku is the kind of novel that reminds you why sweeping, multi-generational storytelling can feel so immersive and necessary when it’s done well. Spanning from the 1800s into the 1990s, this ambitious saga follows generations of women from one Hawaiian family, all bound by their responsibility to protect an ancient stone—the pōhaku—and by the land that shaped them.

Get your copy of The Pōhaku from my independent online bookstore today!

The novel opens in 1992 as Hurricane Iniki bears down on Hawaiʻi. A young woman lies comatose in a hospital after a mysterious fall from a cliff, watched over by her estranged grandmother. Did she jump, was she swept away by a wave, or was something else at play? The grandmother believes the answer lies not only in the pōhaku itself, but in a devastating omission: her granddaughter was never told about the stone, nor about the family’s sacred responsibility to protect it. As the storm approaches, the grandmother begins telling her the story anyway, hoping that restoring this broken line of knowledge might be enough to bring her back.

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Writers on Writing

Reading a lot of books is a skill, not a personality trait

Mandy Webster

By the end of 2025, my social feeds were flooded with book-count roundups. Fifty books. Eighty-seven books. One hundred books, neatly stacked in Canva graphics and celebratory captions. Mixed in among them, especially on Threads, I kept seeing the same question pop up again and again: How are people able to read 100 books in a year?

Reading isn’t a race. It’s a skill you build, a habit you choose, and a joy that looks different for everyone.

The tone of the question always felt half-amazed, half-defeated—like asking how people finish marathons when you can barely make it around the block.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Exes by Leodora Darlington: A wickedly fun debut that doesn’t quite stick the landing

Mandy Webster

Who hasn’t fantasized—purely figuratively—about exacting a little revenge on an ex? The Exes by Leodora Darlington leans hard into that universal impulse, opening as an explosive, darkly entertaining thriller about love gone wrong, bad men getting what they deserve, and the stories women tell themselves to survive heartbreak. Natalie wants what she’s always wanted: the perfect partner, the stable family she never had, a life that finally feels settled. Instead, she’s left with a growing list of exes, each crossed out for reasons that grow more unsettling as the novel unfolds.

Get your copy of The Exes from my independent online bookstore today!

After the mysterious “Big Fallout” leaves Natalie more isolated than ever, she meets James—handsome, charming, seemingly everything she’s been waiting for. Their relationship feels like a second chance, a reset. But as Natalie tries to perform the role of a “normal” wife, unsettling truths begin to surface, forcing her to question not just her marriage, but her own identity. Are her dead exes connected by coincidence, by guilt, or by something much darker? And is Natalie the monster in this story—or is someone else pulling the strings?

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Room in the Attic by T.M. Logan: A domestic thriller powered by male entitlement and bad decisions

Mandy Webster

The Room in the Attic by T.M. Logan arrives with a premise that should be irresistible to fans of domestic suspense: a struggling family stretches itself to buy a rambling Victorian villa, only to uncover a hidden room filled with unsettling clues to someone else’s life. Secrets buried in the walls, secrets inside a marriage, and danger creeping closer with every chapter. On paper, it works. In practice, the novel hinges on a protagonist whose greatest flaw isn’t malice—but an unshakable belief that he knows best, even as he proves again and again that he doesn’t.

Get your copy of The Room in the Attic from my independent online bookstore today!

Adam and Jess move into their new house with their three young children, already under financial strain. Almost immediately, Adam discovers a concealed door hidden behind a fitted wardrobe. Inside the secret room are several random items, including a wallet, an expensive watch, and an old mobile phone. Jess’s reaction is sensible and adult: get rid of them and move on. Adam, however, becomes fixated. He needs to know who they belonged to and why they were hidden, and that curiosity becomes the engine that drives the entire story.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Such Sheltered Lives by Alyssa Sheinmel: Celebrity rehab, buried secrets, and a thriller that finds its footing late

Mandy Webster

Such Sheltered Lives by Alyssa Sheinmel opens inside an ultra-exclusive Hamptons rehab center built on discretion, money, and the promise that no one on the outside will ever find out what happens within its gates. From the opening pages, we know a body will be found on a nearby beach—and that inevitability hangs over Rush’s Recovery like a threat the staff can’t quite contain.

Get your copy of Such Sheltered Lives from my independent online bookstore today!

I’ll be honest: this book gets off to a rough start. The early writing feels tentative and occasionally amateurish, and there are factual errors that pulled me sharply out of the story. One in particular made me stop and reread in disbelief: a character’s academic background is described in a way that suggests someone earned—or was earning—a PhD through night classes at a community college. That’s not a minor slip in phrasing; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how higher education works. No one is getting a doctorate that way. Errors like this made me question the author’s lived experience and research, and they chipped away at my trust in the narrative early on.

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Writers on Writing

Writing adult novels with a young adult point of view: Challenges, opportunities, and why it matters

Mandy Webster

There’s something uniquely compelling—and uniquely tricky—about writing an adult novel through the eyes of a young adult protagonist. You want the story to resonate with adult readers, but the voice will inevitably feel youthful, immediate, and shaped by the character’s limited experience. That tension can be powerful, but it can also trip up both writers and readers if it isn’t handled thoughtfully.

It’s difficult to write an adult novel when telling the story from a young adult point of view.

Take Casey Dunn’s The Wind Witch Murders, for example. The novel is marketed as adult fiction, but its protagonist, Raven, is young, searching, and emotionally raw. The book is written in first-person point of view, which makes it even more difficult to escape the natural YA headspace. Every detail, every observation, every emotional beat is filtered through Raven’s young adult perspective.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot: Grief, motherhood, and the quiet violence of being blamed

Mandy Webster

No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot is one of those novels that quietly proves how wrong first impressions can be. I’ll admit it: I almost passed this one by because the cover looks oddly amateurish, the kind of design that suggests something lightweight or underbaked. I’m genuinely glad I didn’t. What’s inside is a sharp, unsettling literary debut that digs far deeper than its packaging suggests.

Get your copy of No One You Know from my independent online bookstore today!

Set in the Hudson Valley, the novel opens on what looks like a carefully curated life. Kate is a successful realtor and momfluencer with a devoted husband, Ethan, and a close relationship with her teenage daughter, Indie. That surface-level perfection shatters when Indie’s best friend, Maddy, is killed by a drunk driver right in front of her. From that moment on, Tourtelot is less interested in the tragedy itself than in the slow, corrosive aftermath—the way grief destabilizes families, marriages, and entire communities.

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Education, Essays

Why boys are falling behind in school (and what Malcolm Gladwell’s hockey players can teach us about it)

Mandy Webster

I’ve been mulling over a theory about why boys, as a group, are falling behind in education. It’s not that boys are less intelligent or less capable—it might simply come down to timing. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a fascinating concept called the Relative Age Effect. He uses Canadian hockey players as an example: the best players are disproportionately born in the first few months of the year—January, February, and March. Why? Because the cutoff date for youth hockey leagues in Canada is January 1. That means kids born early in the year are almost a full year older (and therefore more developed) than those born later, like in November or December.

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell explores what sets high achievers apart. Could his theory also explain why boys are falling so far behind?

Gladwell points out that this seemingly small age gap matters a lot when you’re eight or nine years old. The slightly older kids are usually bigger, stronger, and more coordinated. They look like “natural talents” to coaches, who then give them more ice time, more praise, and better training. Over time, those advantages snowball. The kids who were just a few months older end up becoming the elite players—not necessarily because they were born to be great, but because they were given more opportunities to become great.

I think something similar happens in school—especially for boys.

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