Please join me in welcoming author Kit Tosello to the blog today to talk about her debut novel, The Color of Home!
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. Learn more at KitTosello.com.
THE COLOR OF HOME by Kit Tosello
GENRE: Small Town Women’s Fiction (Christian)
PUBLISHER: Revell
RELEASE DATE: September 24, 2024
PAGES: 338
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.
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Hi Kit! Welcome to the blog!
Kit: Summer. Although winter is lovely here by the mountains and I adore watching the snow fall, my favorite exercise is walking or hiking outdoors, and I’m a baby about the cold!
Carrie: winter in the mountains must be gorgeous! But, yes, not conducive to outdoor exercise lol
Kit: My husband and I operated a coffeehouse for eleven years, back before Starbucks arrived in our county. But now we operate a loose-tea shop (Suttle Tea). I love tea for the variety it offers, plus health benefits. We source many ingredients directly from local organic farms and love getting creative with our blends!
Carrie: oh I love that!
Kit: This one’s hard. Audiobooks by a nudge. I listen to audiobooks off and on pretty much every day but often start my day with worship music. Both fuel my creativity.
Carrie: for the life of me, i can’t pay attention to audiobooks but i do love music!
Kit: I’d say the cover of The Color of Home is a dead giveaway! I lived a lot of my life near the ocean on the central Coast of California, but for the last twenty years I’ve loved planting roots in our Oregon mountain town.
Carrie: Oregon is so wonderful because you have both ocean & mountains fairly easily accessible!
Q: Around here I like to say that reading is my superpower. If YOU had a superpower, what would it be?
Kit: Definitely teleportation! So I could visit my out-of-state kiddos and grandkids at the drop of a hat. I recently got to spend sixteen days with them, walking them to school, watching gymnastics practices. Parting was bittersweet. I wish I didn’t have to miss so much of their daily lives.
Carrie: right?!? I wish someone would figure out how to make that a standard form of transportation lol
Q: Other than the Bible, what are five of your most cherished books?
Kit: I’ll go with Pride and Prejudice for wit, Gilead for poignance, Christy for courage, and the Advent devotional God Is in the Manger by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others, for inspiration. But my all-time most cherished book is the Grandma Moses Storybook I received as a child from my aunt—the aunt who inspired Daisy in The Color of Home. Filled with short stories and poetry by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Robert Frost, and others, it has Moses’ charming folk art tucked throughout. That book did more to fan my love of words than any other book.
Carrie: i love why you picked each book!
Q: Do you have any strange writing habits/quirks? Any snacks/beverages that are a must when you sit down to write?
Kit: Before writing, I go for a walk (or jog inside the house during winter!). It gives me energy and a clear head. While writing, I’m usually drinking a matcha latte, either hot or iced, with a drop of mint extract added. My Breville electric frother makes this so easy! And—don’t judge, haha—but if I feel the need for popcorn, I eat it with a spoon so I don’t get coconut oil on the keys!
Carrie: hahaha that’s awesome!
Q: If Hollywood wanted to produce The Color of Home as a movie, who would you want to be cast as the lead roles?
Kit: While writing The Color of Home I often slipped into picturing my oldest daughter as Audrey. Like Audrey, she has auburn hair, bright, intelligent eyes, and a few freckles. She’s done acting and modeling in LA so she could totally carry it (spoken like a true mom!). But if my daughter wasn’t into it, I’d go with Emma Stone.
For the love interest, Ryan Gosling—hands down.
For Aunt Daisy, let’s go with Sally Field. But only because Katharine Hepburn is no longer available, haha.
Carrie: ooo I’m totally going to picture Katharine Hepburn when I meet Daisy on the pages now 🙂
Q: Did you have the whole plot outlined before you started writing The Color of Home, or did you let the characters dictate what came next?
Kit: I began with a loose outline, characters I already knew pretty well, and a bunch of scenes that I could see very clearly in my head but that needed a LOT of connective tissue. It was as if the characters knew what to do next even when I didn’t. So there were many surprises for me along the way. For example, I didn’t realize how much witty dialogue some characters were capable of. And a certain plot twist near the end caught me off-guard, which was so fun!
Carrie: Plot twists that catch the author off-guard are always delightful to discover as a reader too!
Q: What is one of your favorite quotes from the book & why do you love it?
Kit: Audrey’s great aunt Daisy is a fountain of life wisdom. But this is only because she has weathered more than her share of sorrow and disappointment and learned to lean into the Lord’s strength. To trust even when it makes no sense. At one point she tells Audrey, “The unexpected life is our actual life.”
Don’t we all conjure our own ideas about how life should go? It’s human nature. We even make assumptions about what God wants for us. But whenever we find ourselves without peace, fighting for things like security or ease or success, we’ve probably elevated our plan over the plan that will grow and shape us as Christ desires. Given the choice, we’d often short ourselves of the beauty and freedom that’s found on the other side of surrender. We can choose to embrace the unexpected!
Carrie: oh that’s profound. I love that!
Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me! 🙂 Before we say goodbye for today, tell us what‘s coming up next for you.
Kit: Right now I’m pouring my heart into finishing up a second small-town story set in Charity Falls, with endearing new characters and just possibly some cameo appearances from The Color of Home folks. Meanwhile, I do have some fun news. An essay and family recipe of mine will appear in The Kitchen Devotional: Reading and Recipes to Feed Your Soul, Nourish Your Faith, and Bring Joy to the Table from Baker Publishing Group, which releases in December. And in the spring of 2025, watch for a special, heartfelt essay in So God Made a Grandma: Caring, Faithful, Creative, Devoted, Wise, Generous, Resilient—Just Like You from Tyndale.
Revell is offering a print copy of The Color of Home by Kit Tosello to TWO of my readers! (US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.) This giveaway is subject to Reading Is My SuperPower’s giveaway policies which can be found here. Enter via the Rafflecopter form below.
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What about you? What makes you want to read The Color of Home by Kit Tosello?
