In a moment when public conversations around healing, art, and belief are becoming more personal and perhaps more urgent, The Color of Miracles, the latest novel by Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author Kieth Merrill, offers something rare: a story that refuses to shout but insists on being heard.

Set in the rhythms of everyday life, the book explores how creativity can become a form of service, and how belief, spiritual or otherwise, can evolve through acts of care and imagination. While its setting isn’t local, its values resonate in communities where art, education, and emotional well-being are tightly woven together.

A Story of Art, Resistance, and the Unseen

The narrative centers on Thomas Hall, a muralist best known for his prehistoric-themed murals in science museums. His work is acclaimed, but he himself is quietly guarded, a man who maintains a calculated distance from topics like faith, suffering, or personal transformation.

When the Pacific Science Museum hires Hall to paint a Cro-Magnon mural, he’s given strict creative parameters by museum director Silas Hawker, an outspoken atheist. No biblical symbolism, no suggestion of divinity, just pure science.

Enter a very different kind of offer: a request from Susan “Cass” Cassidy, a determined hospital administrator with a deep belief in the therapeutic power of beauty. She invites Hall to create a mural for the Healing Place, a quiet room in St. Mark’s Hospital where seriously ill children go to rest, recover, and hope.

Cass wants a visual reflection of miracles.

Hall, skeptical of miracles and the language of faith, initially resists. But Cass’s passion and her personal connection to one young patient get his attention.

Christina: A Catalyst for Change

That young patient is Christina, a child recovering from traumatic burns sustained in a car accident that claimed her mother’s life. Withdrawn and largely nonverbal, Christina communicates through her violin, a battered but beloved instrument that survived the crash.

Christina’s quiet strength becomes a turning point for Hall. He begins to question the emotional boundaries he’s placed around himself—and the meaning of the mural he’s been asked to create. As he researches the miracles of Jesus for artistic reference, not out of devotion but design, something deeper begins to shift.

Through his growing friendship with Cass and his emotional connection to Christina, Hall moves from reluctant participation to quiet investment. The mural becomes more than a painting; it becomes a reckoning.

A Cast of Voices and Questions

Merrill populates the novel with richly rendered supporting characters, each offering a unique lens on belief, suffering, and resilience. There’s Reverend Mike, a once zealous preacher turned weary skeptic, and his wife JingWei, a woman of serene and unshakeable faith. Together, they form a kind of spiritual compass for Hall, even as he struggles to find his own center.

Frank Berger, Hall’s fast-talking agent, offers the voice of commercial logic, while Clinton Carver, a member of the hospital board, pushes back against any suggestion of religious imagery in a public space. Miss Von Horn, the granddaughter of the hospital’s founder, balances this, believing the mural should openly honor Jesus and his miracles.

These characters don’t argue in platitudes. Instead, they explore the complexity of public belief in private spaces, something increasingly relevant in a pluralistic society.

The Man Behind the Murals

Kieth Merrill is no stranger to storytelling. A veteran filmmaker and novelist, he won the 1974 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and went on to direct both IMAX films and major motion pictures. But his latest work, The Color of Miracles, feels different, more intimate, more interior.

Born and raised in Utah, Merrill still draws from his roots in both the West and the world of faith. His life has included ranch work, film sets, and classroom lectures. He’s the father of eight, grandfather of forty, and a longtime advocate for education and youth development.

While Merrill’s creative reach is wide, his thematic interests remain consistent: transformation, conviction, and the everyday grace that surfaces in hard places.

A Local Connection to Broader Themes

Though the novel takes place in San Francisco, Sausalito, and Marin County, its story echoes in communities where the arts and healthcare often intersect. In many towns and neighborhoods, murals are aesthetic and therapeutic. Hospitals, schools, and even transit stations commission public art not only to inspire, but to heal.

Readers familiar with programs that bring music and art into recovery spaces, or who’ve seen how creative initiatives help children navigate illness, will find something familiar in Merrill’s narrative. The Healing Place may be fictional, but its spirit is visible in real-life efforts across the country.

Cass’s vision that color, light, and imagery can ease fear is hopeful and can be practiced every day by people who believe that care extends beyond the physical.

The Color of Miracles invites deeper thinking and a more compassionate view of others. Available now via Amazon and Goodreads.