Publication Date: September 24, 2024
Audrey Needham, Bay Area interior designer to the rich and pretentious, is down to her last nerve. Her boss is impossible to please, her future is in jeopardy, and her great-aunt Daisy needs support as her husband descends into Alzheimer’s.
When Daisy enlists Audrey’s help preparing for a move to assisted living, Audrey risks her career to return to the idyllic small town of Charity Falls, Oregon, the summer stomping grounds of her childhood. But Charity Falls was also the place that broke her heart when her father was killed in a tragic fire at the Sugar Pine Inn thirteen years ago.
Despite Audrey’s intent to avoid emotional entanglement, the pull of home is hard to resist. Something should be done about the deteriorating inn. A local girl with an incarcerated father needs a friend. And handsome local do-gooder Cade Carter is coloring Audrey all shades of uncertain.
Join award-winning writer and debut novelist Kit Tosello in this lyrical and often humorous exploration of how God redeems brokenness and draws us to the life we’re meant to find.
Kit Tosello’s debut novel, The Color of Home, is soulful, heartfelt, and utterly brilliant in its scope and depth of human emotion.
Audrey Needham is caught up in the Silicon Valley vortex of frantic “busyness” and the drive for renown and success. Still, Audrey hears the whispers of a small voice inside her, trying to be heard. That voice may find its chance when Audrey heads to the small town of Charity Falls, Oregon, where she spent wonderful summers growing up. With her husband, Dean’s, onset of dementia, Audrey’s Aunt Daisy has uncharacteristically asked for help to prepare their home for sale so they can move into an assisted living facility.
Audrey is happy to go, though concerned about taking a vacation at what seems to be a bad time. Upon reaching Charity Falls, however, the manic pieces of Audrey’s life seem to fall away, replaced with a new and invigorating sense of peace and connectedness to her aunt and uncle, to the people of Charity Falls, and most especially to herself.
Interactions with Charity Falls residents, as well as Aunt Daisy and Uncle Dean, are fun and lively as they share casual thoughts, creating Audrey’s newly realized insights and awareness. Audrey’s first interactions with one resident in particular, Cade Carter, seem to have a negative impact on her, but ultimately lead her to wonder more about herself and help her recognize the next right thing for her and her life.
Tosello has a gift for prose and arranging words that leave the reader sighing with delight and reaching for a pen or highlighter to note many vivid and lovely phrases. The Color of Home is a masterful and earnest work of heart. It brims with intensity and the yearning and learning to know and act on doing the next right thing. Brilliantly and soulfully penned.
The world painted with colors and populated with deep thoughts in The Color of Home is more beautiful in scope than mere words. It’s a feeling felt in the deepest reaches of the soul.
Kit Tosello is an award-winning writer of small-town contemporary fiction with a big heart, as well as inspirational essays and devotionals. With her eye trained on the beauty hiding in plain sight all around us, she arranges words with tenderness, humor, and hope. When not writing, Kit can be found in the loose-tea shop she operates with her husband, exploring the great Pacific Northwest, or enjoying the “great indoors”—bookstores and libraries. Always with a matcha latte in hand.
