Valerie Fraser Luesse is the bestselling author of Missing Isaac, Almost Home, The Key to Everything, Under the Bayou Moon, and Letters from My Sister. She is an award-winning magazine writer best known for her feature stories and essays in Southern Living, where she retired as senior travel editor. A graduate of Auburn University and Baylor University, she lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband, Dave.
In this interview, Valerie discusses her latest novel, The Light on Horn Island.
FF: Can you please provide a brief summary of your novel The Light on Horn Island?
When Edie Gardner’s life in New York comes crumbling down, her grandmother, Adele “Punk” Cheramie, urges her to return to Bayou du Chêne, a tiny hamlet in coastal Mississippi where Edie spent many happy summers growing up. Punk and her three closest friends introduce Edie to the Trove, a fascinating gallery and antique shop that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.
The Trove’s proprietor, Jason Toussaint, has a gift for reading his customers’ needs. He gives Edie a Victorian parlor game called Confessions, which asks players a series of ever-more-personal questions. It seems like harmless fun at first. But the game has a way of uncovering secrets—including a heartbreaking disappearance that has haunted one of the players for decades.
Banding together, these women are determined to mend each other’s hurts, encourage each other’s dreams, and find the answers that will bring healing.
FF: Can you tell us more about the character of Edie Gardner? What challenges does she face when returning to her childhood summer home?
By nature, Edie is optimistic and positive, curious and openhearted, but she has just experienced a loss that she can’t come to terms with. She is wounded. Never one for easy answers, she knows that she can’t move forward until she makes sense of what has happened to her. And so she has returned to a place that has always brought her joy and comfort—the Mississippi coast, Horn Island in particular.
FF: In The Light on Horn Island, Edie finds herself in the midst of a group of women who have been friends for a long time—friends who know one another’s histories. But there are still things friends keep from one another. Why do you think we generally find it difficult to examine and process our pasts?
Guilt, pain, disappointment, shame…all of the above. We all have a vision of our best selves, the person we’d like to be, and it’s hard to revisit those times when we didn’t measure up. Looking back on past mistakes and disappointments can make us question who we really are—and whether the people who love us would still feel the same way “if they only knew.” That’s where grace comes in.
FF: The Trove is a pivotal location in the story. What significance does this antique shop hold for the characters and the plot?
I don’t want to give away too much, but when I created this mysterious gallery and named it the Trove, I was thinking about Scripture: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21 NIV, emphasis added). Each of the women in the story is moved by something specific in the Trove, something she connects to that represents a specific need in her life—filled or unfulfilled. I think I’d better leave it at that.
FF: Jason Toussaint, owner of the Trove antique shop, has an uncanny ability to identify the perfect item for each of his customers. What was your inspiration for his character?
I love Jason’s unknowable nature. At least, that’s the way he seems to most people. Jason was inspired by an actor I had seen play some truly malevolent characters. And then I saw him interviewed on a talk show. Laughing and smiling, he looked like a totally different person. I thought that was kind of fascinating—how something as simple and natural as a smile could completely transform not just a person’s face but their apparent character and intent.
FF: The Light on Horn Island focuses on a group of women supporting each other. How important is female friendship in your novels?
It’s central to all of them. There’s a richness and texture to female friendships that fascinate me, especially when one woman finds herself “a stranger in a strange land” and needs an adoptive sisterhood to get her through. You see that in Under the Bayou Moon, where the women of a Louisiana community wrap their arms around their new schoolteacher from Alabama. You see it in Almost Home, with Dolly Chandler mothering a troubled young wife staying at her wartime boardinghouse. And again in Letters from My Sister, which has women from two families, one Black and one White, banding together for survival, both spiritual and literal. Women have long used their collective power to raise each other up.
FF: You’ve set books in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, and now Mississippi. What is it about the American South that makes it such a compelling setting for fiction?
Some people think of the South as a big block of wood cut from a single tree, but it’s more like a cluster of leaves from lots of different trees, pooled together on the surface of the same creek. They share an undercurrent but maintain their distinctive colors. If they didn’t, we’d have nothing to argue about! I think the South is endlessly fascinating. It’s complicated. It’s difficult. But it’s also rich and vibrant and impossible to define. I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather write about.
FF: What lessons do you hope readers will take away from The Light on Horn Island?
For one thing, that we shouldn’t take people for granted. Or maybe I should say we shouldn’t take their experiences for granted—we shouldn’t assume we know everything about them or what they’ve been through.
Also, I think the book is a meditation on mercy and grace—what we receive from God and show to each other.
FF: You’ve had a successful career as a travel editor for Southern Living. How does your background in journalism influence your fiction writing?
My Southern Living experience has had an enormous impact on my fiction writing. When I was a travel editor, my job was to seek out the best places in the South for readers to experience. That meant exploring the local culture, understanding how people and places shape each other, and communicating all that through a compelling story, working in tandem with a photographer. Watching visual artists approach the same story as me—only through a camera lens, not a keyboard—was a tremendous education. That training has helped me create a strong sense of place in my stories. Readers often tell me they feel they’re watching the story happen rather than reading it, and that’s gratifying—to feel that I’ve fired their imagination so they see their own version of the story.
FF: What are you working on next?
Completely upending my life! My husband and I decided that we need to live closer to my parents, so we’re selling our house in Birmingham and moving into a little place in a pine thicket on my folks’ property. I’m excited about returning to the cotton fields and creek beds I grew up with. We’re also hoping to build a little getaway on the Mississippi coast, which we love. I’m hoping this will be a really inspiring and creative time for us, and that novels pour out of it!
The Light on Horn Island
Valerie Fraser Luesse
Revell
Genres: Women’s Fiction, Southern Fiction
Release Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN-10: 0800741617
ISBN-13: 978-0800741617
Book Summary:
When her big-city life in New York collapses all around her, Edie Gardner has only one choice—to return to Bayou du Chêne, the tiny coastal Mississippi hamlet where she spent many happy summers as a child with her grandmother, Adele “Punk” Cheramie. Perhaps Punk and her three closest friends—who have dubbed themselves the Ten Spots—can save Edie from what her life has become.
The ladies introduce Edie to the Trove, an eclectic gallery and antique shop that seems to have appeared out of nowhere. The Trove’s proprietor, Jason Toussaint, has a particular gift for knowing just what his customers need. Edie comes away with a Victorian parlor game called Confessions, which asks players a series of ever-more-personal questions. It’s fun at first, but this game has a knack for uncovering secrets—including a heartbreaking disappearance that has haunted one of the players for decades.
CLICK TO BUY
Buy The Light on Horn Island from the FamilyFiction Amazon Affiliate HERE!