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.
In this interview, Kit discusses her latest novel, The Color of Home.
FF: Can you please provide a brief summary of your novel, The Color of Home?
Audrey Needham’s life as a Bay Area interior designer appears glittering on the outside, but in truth she’s unraveling. When Audrey travels to small-town Oregon to help her great- aunt Daisy in her time of need, she’s forced to place her career on the line and face the painful parts of her past she’s long avoided. But she hasn’t counted on becoming emotionally attached to a lonely young girl, riled up about the Sugar Pine Inn’s grievous neglect, or intrigued by handsome Cade Carter.
FF: Your female protagonist, Audrey Needham, leaves behind the fast-paced life of San Francisco and heads to the quaint town of Charity Falls, Oregon. What event led to this change?
With Great-Uncle Dean slipping further into Alzheimer’s, Great-Aunt Daisy requests Audrey’s help preparing for a move into assisted living. Although it puts her in her boss’s bad graces, Audrey takes two weeks off to help Daisy, expecting a quick return to her demanding career.
FF: Can you describe Aunt Daisy and explain her situation?
Daisy is a seventy-six-year-old woman with a strong faith, forged in the furnace of loss. She’s beloved in Charity Falls, known by all for the tantalizing dishes and baked goods she used to prepare at the Sugar Pine Inn. Now retired and faced with giving up her home due to her husband’s descent into Alzheimer’s, she’s at a huge pinch point in her faith. Her courage and joy have gone missing.
FF: Although Audrey spent a number of memorable summers in Charity Falls, one incident in particular shattered her love for the town. Can you provide some background information on this event?
Daisy and Dean raised Audrey’s father as their own. While Audrey was young, he often traveled to Charity Falls to visit and help them with household projects. On one such visit, he was trapped in a deadly fire. On the brink of her sixteenth birthday, Audrey lost her dad, and her idyllic childhood came to a tragic end.
FF: Shortly after Audrey arrives in town, she faces another life-altering event, which forces her to immerse herself in the town and its colorful residents. Can you provide more information on this event?
Unexpectedly, the bridge back to Audrey’s normal life burns down when she learns her design job back home is no longer waiting for her. Her paycheck-to-paycheck existence means she needs to take a job, any job, and stat. Until she has funds to fix her car, she can’t even return home on the horse she rode in on. Leaning on her college-days experience working in the paint department at Home Depot, she takes a job mixing paint at Homer’s Hardware. It’s decidedly unglamorous, and some of the townsfolk are, well, shall we say, unrefined? But she swallows her pride because it’s only meant to be temporary.
FF: The Color of Home deals with a few weightier topics. How do you balance both humor and hope in your novel?
In life, it’s often the people around us who help us endure hard things with humor and hope. So, as I wrote this story, humor happened organically, simply by welcoming a variety of characters—some with witty dialogue, some with character quirks. Even Uncle Dean, despite his condition, retains some of his corny humor.
Hope isn’t usually something we can produce at our own will. True hope develops through remembered experiences of God’s faithfulness—our own experiences and others’. In The Color of Home, we get to hear such testimonies, enough for our characters to find a way forward. Hope is caught more than taught, which is why community is a theme in The Color of Home.
FF: Your debut novel is packed with themes of home, new beginnings, and love. Are there other themes or lessons that you hope to convey to readers?
Unlike the messages we receive from our Western culture, Jesus never taught rugged individualism or emphasized personal performance. Quite the opposite. His teaching focused on relationships. So the value of community is an intentional theme in The Color of Home. Also, the beauty and value of one small, self-sacrificial life.
Another theme that emerged is that life hurts, and we all develop our personal coping methods. It’s important to become aware that the ways we stuff our emotions can keep us from thriving as God intends. Audrey’s unhealthy method is a common one: keeping her head down and focusing on superficial things that are ultimately meaningless—career success, finances, a sense of control over externals.
FF: The Color of Home is packed with a colorful cast of characters. Do you have a favorite character? If so, why?
I love them all, but I’m especially partial to Daisy. She is loosely inspired by my aunt—my dad’s sister—who was the closest thing to a grandmother I had growing up. When I was a child, my aunt gave me what became my favorite storybook. When I was a teen, she gave me my first journal and encouraged me to fill it up with words and poetry, which I did. Daisy’s story is not at all my aunt’s story, but there are commonalities that make Daisy precious to me.
FF: The story is set in the fictional small town of Charity Falls, Oregon. What do you love most about this setting?
I could live in Charity Falls. In fact, I kind of do! Charity Falls has a lot in common with my small town of Sisters, Oregon, especially if you go back twenty years, when it was even smaller. The Three Sisters mountains, the high-desert landscape, and the Western-themed downtown area are the same. It’s beautiful, yes, but my favorite thing has to be the small-town, folksy vibe.
FF: Please tell readers a little more about yourself.
I worked as a kitchen designer for many years, until the economic downturn around 2009 gave me the excuse to make a bold midlife career change. When I started my writing-and-editing journey and retired my design-and-sales hat, I felt—much like Audrey—like I was stripping off an outfit that had begun to pinch in all the wrong places. My youngest child said, “Now you’ll have time to write your book!” That was fourteen years ago, and that’s how long it took to be sitting here with my first published novel. But I’ve loved every minute of the journey!
The Color of Home was inspired in part by meaningful personal experiences that came about during those years of honing my craft—deeply moving experiences that were quietly steeping in my heart: I witnessed firsthand the remarkable healing potential of equine therapy for wounded young people as well as for the differently abled. And while working for a nonprofit publisher that distributes Christian resources to the incarcerated, I must have read hundreds of letters from inmates reaching out for hope, for Jesus. These experiences helped give rise to The Color of Home.
The Color of Home
Kit Tosello
Revell
Genres: Contemporary, Small Town Fiction, Women’s Fiction
Release Date: September 24, 2024
ISBN-10: 0800772695
ISBN-13: 978-0800772697
Book Summary:
The life she’s designing may not be the life she’s meant to live
Bay Area interior designer to the rich and pretentious, Audrey Needham is already on thin ice with her impossible-to-please boss when her great-aunt Daisy asks for support as her husband descends into Alzheimer’s. Now Audrey is risking the career she worked hard to build as she returns to Charity Falls, Oregon.
Her feelings toward the idyllic small town are…complicated. While she has many good memories of her childhood summers there, Charity Falls is also the place her father was killed in a tragic fire at the Sugar Pine Inn thirteen years ago.
Despite Audrey’s intent to avoid emotional entanglement, 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. The pull of home is hard to resist.
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