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Tori Eldridge is a bestselling author, Broadway alumna, martial artist, and grandmother. Her career path, or rather her artistic cartography, defies the contours of any one medium. She has lived in the kinetic world of the Lily Wong thrillers—sleek and urgent, grounded in martial arts and cultural dualities—and in the darker, more surreal terrain of her standalone novel Dance Among the Flames. But her newest work, Kaua‘i Storm, feels different. It marks both a return and a beginning.
The novel, the first in a new mystery series, introduces Makalani Pahukula, an Oregon national park ranger who returns to her native Kaua‘i after a decade away. There, she finds her island home shadowed by uncertainty—her family fragmented, her culture threatened, her cousins mysteriously missing. If this premise suggests a traditional suspense arc, Eldridge quickly complicates the frame: Kaua‘i Storm is, above all, a story of return—spiritual, familial, geographical. It is a novel that invites its author back to herself.
What makes this homecoming more intimate still is that Tori did not simply write the book—she voiced it. Kaua‘i Storm is her first foray into narrating her own fiction, a decision that reawakens a former life as a performer on stage and screen. “Any excuse to talk to you is a good excuse,” she said at the start of our recent conversation, the warmth in her voice unmistakable. When asked why she chose to narrate the book herself, her answer was disarmingly candid: “Because they hired me,” she said, laughing. But the full story, like so many in her life, is more textured.
During the early stages of production, Eldridge filled out a standard narrator questionnaire, flagging her familiarity with ‘ōlelo
Hawai‘i and Hawaiian Pidgin—crucial elements for a novel so deeply rooted in place. She added, almost as an afterthought, that she had once been an actress, had done voiceover work, had hosted a podcast. Then she moved on, not expecting anything to come of it—until her editor reached out with a surprise: Brilliance Publishing wanted her to audition.
Suddenly, she was back in the familiar but long-abandoned territory of waiting for a gig. “I had to remind myself,” she said, “‘Chill, Tori, you’re an author. You should be hoping for the best narrator for your book. If that’s you, great. If it’s not, great.’” But when she got the part, the thrill was undeniable. “I went running around the house screaming—it was hilarious.” I remember that call. “I got it! I got it! I got it!” she shouted.
Yet audiobook narration, she discovered, is not simply acting in miniature. It is its own discipline, more intimate and more exposed. There is no camera, no stage, no ensemble to lean on—just voice and breath and silence. Before recording, she reached out to narrator friends, rehearsed for ten days with a broadcast microphone and studio headphones, familiarized herself with “punch-ins”—the practice of rerecording individual lines with surgical precision. She worked with director Jennifer Aquino, herself an award-winning actor with roots in Hawai‘i. “By the time those ten days were up,” Eldridge said, “I felt so locked in.” The actual recording sessions, held at Digital One Studios in Portland, were, in her words, “smooth sailing.”
The studio has always been a sanctuary for Tori Eldridge. As a singer and actress, she had found in its padded hush a kind of creative stillness—controlled, contained, exacting. Narration, however, required new adaptations. “You’re not shouting, even when your character is,” she explained. “You’re conveying intensity without raising your voice. And when you’re thinking to yourself”—she dropped into a whisper—“you’re not actually getting that quiet, either. You’re creating the illusion of thought.”
Beneath this technical craft ran a deeper current. Eldridge had long intended to write about her homeland but hesitated. “Truthfully, I wasn’t ready,” she admitted. Her earlier work paid tribute to her Chinese and Norwegian heritage, to her discipline as a martial artist. But Hawai‘i, she said, demanded something else—something closer to bone and breath. “I finally felt grounded enough, mature enough, in my writing to be authentic and to address what’s happening with Native Hawaiians today.” This was not a matter of backdrop or atmosphere. “It couldn’t just be a cool mystery set in paradise. It had to be a book only a kanaka maoli—Native Hawaiian—could tell.”
The timing was no coincidence. Becoming a tūtū—a grandmother—brought clarity. Her granddaughter, Moana (“Yes, like the movie,” she said with a grin), and her grandson, Nahele, whose name means “forest,” had reframed her sense of self. “I’ve now become the keeper of traditions,” she told me, “and little bits of language, and things to pass on.” That legacy, once an abstract notion, had suddenly taken form—chubby hands, echoing laughter, a name passed down.
Though Kaua‘i Storm is specific in its cultural grounding, its themes are expansive: family, estrangement, inheritance, belonging. Eldridge’s acting background—her instinct for dialogue, her sense of pacing, the physicality of voice—helped her animate these tensions. But the emotional core of the novel lay in something more universal: the question of return. What does it mean to go back? To find that you are no longer the person who left, and not quite the person who stayed? “That,” she said, “was what I realized the book was about.”
“Here I was wondering, ‘What do I even know about what’s going on in Hawai‘i today?’ And that’s the point. That’s the experience. That feeling of being part of the Hawaiian diaspora, and wanting to reconnect.”
Eldridge’s evolution—artist, martial artist, author, narrator—is less a straight line than a series of returns, each deepening rather than discarding the last. The extroverted drive of youth yielded to the centered discipline of martial arts, which in turn gave way to the contemplative solitude of writing. “I’m happier at 64 than I’ve ever been,” she said, and not with the defensiveness of someone trying to prove it. It was a simple truth. “A calm mind, an easy heart, the love of my family—that’s happiness.”
As for genre, she continues to resist containment. Dance Among the Flames veered into magical realism; the Lily Wong books were as much about family as they were about crime. Kaua‘i Storm is no different: “a multi-generational family story, an exciting wilderness adventure, a mystery,” she listed, “and all of it grounded in culture.” She smiled. “I can’t make up my mind, so I do all of them.”
Narrating the book brought its own revelations. “I was already working on book two while recording book one,” she told me. Hearing the inner thoughts spoken aloud gave her new insight into their cadence, their rhythm. She adjusted her prose accordingly, tuned it for voice as well as page. “Jennifer”—her director—“knew she could tell me anything. I wanted to hear it. I wanted to grow.”
Why we write is a question all authors continually ask ourselves. For today’s iteration of Tori Eldridge, it carries the weight of something lived. “It connects me to my heritage. It’s changing how I feel about myself. It’s rooting me as a grandmother. And all of that,” she paused, “is coming through the vehicle of writing.”
Kaua‘i Storm, available now in print and audiobook, is many things—a mystery, a meditation, a reclamation. But at its heart, it is a story of voice: the voice we return to, the voice we lend, the voice that carries us home.
Learn more about Tori Eldridge.
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