Joanna Thurlow is the author of Forever is the Sweetest Con, a Summer/Fall 2026 Indies Introduce selection. 
Coco Zephir of An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts, served on the panel that selected Thurlow's book for Indies Introduce.
“Cleo needs cash. Fast. What better way to solve her problem than join the cast of a reality dating show? Cynical Cleo has been burned in love one too many times… so there’s no chance of catching feelings, right? You’ll love this romance that promises you one thing, while pulling the floor out beneath you. It’s a romance, it’s an adventure, it’s a mystery — you’ll love every minute with Cleo, Kei, and the cast of Camp Couple-Up,” said Zephir.
Thurlow sat down with Zephir to discuss this debut title. This is a transcript of their discussion. You can listen to the interview on the ABA podcast, BookED.
Coco Zephir: Hi, my name is Coco Zephir from An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts, and I'm here with Joanna Thurlow, a writer & editor, yoga teacher, and professionally trained baker who proudly claims to make the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. Over the past two decades, she has taught yoga with @modoyoga, owned several studios, and lived in five different countries while completing her MA in Spanish. A lover of books, sunsets at the family cottage, and “pie-in-a-bathing-suit” season, Joanna is happiest with her husband, their two children, and the dog she never expected to adore. This is her debut novel.
Welcome, Joanna. I'm so excited to speak with you today!
Joanna Thurlow: Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
CZ: Our panel was blown away by Forever is the Sweetest Con, its cross-genre appeal and its new and exciting take on romance.
JT: Thank you.
CZ: Thank you for writing a romance! It's the genre of my heart, and so many readers' hearts. Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to write in that genre?
JT: It's the genre of my heart as well, to be honest. I read really widely across genres, but romance is the one that I just always go to if I need a little comfort, or if I don't know what to read next. If I reach for a romance, it always does the trick.
When I started writing this book, I was actually writing this really serious historical fiction. It was a struggle, and I was really not having a great time. It was, frankly, a total bummer, and every day I was thinking to myself, “Well, when's the next episode of Love Island coming out?” Because it was the summer, and there's an episode almost every day. It's very intense but I'm very committed.
So, I was like, “Oh, I just want to write a romance based on Love Island.” I kept having this thought, and then one day I was like, “Wait a second, I have free will, I can write a romance based on Love Island. I don't have to put myself through this.” So that's what I did!
CZ: And we've benefited, it's amazing.
JT: Thank you! From day one, it was such a shift in my mindset, how much fun I was having. Writing this was such a blast compared to this other thing, which I'm now trying to repurpose into a romance, so we'll see if I have more fun with it that way.
CZ: Exciting! One thing that came across in our panel of readers is that Forever is the Sweetest Con keeps readers’ attention until the very end with this cross-genre appeal. It feels like you incorporate elements of mystery and thriller that draws readers from all interests.
Could you discuss your choice to incorporate the dramatic elements?
JT: It's a little embarrassing to say, but I don't know if it was actually a conscious choice. I am somebody who tends to over complicate things, so I was like, “Okay, I want to write a romance. I want it to be a Love Island theme with fake dating as the main trope,” but then I was like, “Okay, so they pretend they're not in love, but they actually are. How do I write 300 pages of that?”
As I started to flesh out the plot a little more, things started to get a little more complicated, and they took this darker turn or twist. Actually, in my writing and in my revising, I had to consciously remind myself that, “This is a romance. I have to keep that romance thread strong throughout the book.” Left unchecked, this book could have really turned into something different altogether. I hope I successfully managed to keep the romantic side throughout everything else.
CZ: Oh, you did, and that's part of why the booksellers on the panel loved it. We all read really widely, and I think that's why people are really drawn to your book, because of all the different elements that you incorporate which is really lovely.
Let's talk about Cleo, your protagonist. What an amazing character! She's tough, she doesn't believe in love, and yet she jumps on a reality dating TV show and she's willing to get her hands dirty. How did Cleo come to be?
JT: I love Cleo. I don't know that everybody will, because she's not warm and fuzzy like your average romance heroine. She's a bit prickly, but she's got so much good in her. She's got a really good heart, and she has, I think, a really good growth arc over the course of the book.
When I first started writing her, she was much darker. She was very deeply depressed; she was full of self-loathing. As I was writing this, I was learning how to write a book as I went, essentially, and I learned about the difference between active and passive emotions in characters.
I learned how depression is a passive emotion. In readers it evokes empathy and sympathy, but it doesn't really evoke curiosity and curiosity is what you need in order to keep readers turning pages and keep them rooting for the characters. I had to really calibrate her character so that I could maintain those harder edges that I really liked about her, that I thought made her really unique, without making her into a total downer of a character and keeping readers curious about her.
CZ: That's so interesting about active and passive emotions. Something that really stuck out to us on the panel is that the setting really acts as its own character in your novel. The wilds of Canada's Northern Ontario are at once this beautiful backdrop, and moments later it serves as a force to be reckoned with. How does setting influence your story?
JT: I have trouble with setting, to be honest. The first draft of this book was like, “They're on an island in a lake in the Canadian Shield, like, what more do you want from me? That's good, isn’t it?” As I mentioned, I was learning how to write a book, and I came across the advice to find ways to make things hard on your character, to create conflict, to create tension, to create challenges that the character can then overcome, and so I really took that to heart with this book. I really put Cleo through it on every front.
One of the ways that I thought I could do that was to take her totally out of her element. She's born and raised in Las Vegas, and I was like, “What is the furthest thing from the Las Vegas strip, maybe not geographically, but certainly like spiritually?” and I was like, “Okay, the woods, the middle of the wilderness.” I'm Canadian, so this is very easy to render in my brain.
She leaves Vegas, she ends up not just in the woods, but on an island in a lake in the woods. It's a different climate, there's different wildlife, and it's incredibly isolated, and all of these things presented opportunities to create conflict and challenge for her. So, the setting became an antagonist in the story for Cleo and for the other campers as well.
CZ: And we love you for it! What would you like your readers to take away from reading Forever is the Sweetest Con?
JT: Honestly, I just want people to have a good time reading it. It's tough out there these days, and something I love about romance is the escapism that it provides. It's not fantasy, you know, as a genre, but it gives people a chance to get away from everything that's happening.
I love the idea of a reader getting lost in the book, and putting everything else down and letting it simmer in the background for a few hours while they read, and come out maybe feeling a little hopeful, optimistic the way that only romance can make us feel, you know?
CZ: That's the beauty of romance.
JT: Absolutely. It's so underestimated. I was having a conversation with my therapist about writing this book, and at first, I was having trouble taking myself seriously, and I was a little bit nervous to tell people I was writing a romance. I was like, “This is 25-year-olds on a reality show, it just doesn't seem that important,” and she was like, “Is love not important? Is fun not important?” and I was like, “Oh, wow, yeah, those are actually the most important things.”
CZ: I'm so glad that she said that, and that’s exactly right. Those are the themes in romance, and it brings us all together and it gives us hope and joy, and lifts us up, which is exactly what your book does. I'm so glad that it came to be in that way.
JT: Thank you so much, and thank you for reading. I was so thrilled to hear that booksellers liked it. I couldn't take a higher compliment, so thank you for that.
CZ: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, and congratulations again on Forever is the Sweetest Con being an Indies Introduce title.
You can learn more about this author at joannathurlow.com.
ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.