A street corner. A sketchpad. And a man’s society stopped noticing long ago.
In The Color of Miracles by Keith Merrill, one of the most quietly powerful moments doesn’t happen in a hospital or gallery—but on the sidewalk, where artist Thomas Hall meets Jake Demeanus, a homeless man whose eyes carry more truth than any canvas.
Jake isn’t just a stranger. He’s a challenge. To Thomas’s comfort. To society’s judgments. To our assumptions about value and dignity.
Keith Merrill shifts the story’s tone in that single encounter, revealing the wounds on the city’s surface and those buried inside Thomas himself. Jake doesn’t plead for help. He speaks with clarity, insight, and human depth, which disarms Thomas more than any critic could. It’s not a lecture—it’s a living sermon on visibility, worth, and forgotten souls.
However, Thomas’s actual conflict comes from his encounter with Jake and a deeper, unexpected confrontation with profound philosophical questions. As Thomas is asked to paint a mural illustrating the descent of man, which aligns with Darwin’s theory of evolution, he finds no difficulty. But the clash comes when he is forced to reconcile the scientific worldviews of Silas Hawker, an atheist and staunch Darwinist, and the perspective of Dr. Dennis Hamilton, a former museum director fired for calling evolution a theory instead of a fact.
Through Jake, Keith Merrill’s The Color of Miracles explores how we decide who matters. Thomas’s art may hang in museums, but it’s in his reflections on the opposing worldviews of Dr. Hawker and Dr. Hamilton—and the inexplicable miracle of a girl named Christina—that he starts to see what art—and people—are really for.
This is not a story about saving someone. It’s about truly seeing them. And letting that change you. But more profoundly, it’s about confronting the boundaries of belief and finding a new path when the old ones no longer serve.
If you’re ready for a novel that looks deeper than headlines and pierces the silence around the unseen, The Color of Miracles by Keith Merrill is your next read. Find it now on Amazon or enter the story at the official website, where every page reveals the people we so often overlook.