Portrait Beyond the Frame

Written as brush strokes applied to canvas, Portrait Beyond the Frame is the story of Baba Bonacour, a white woman, whose passion is painting. In Greenwich Village days before Kennedy's inauguration, she finds herself pregnant by an African-American man who has already left her. This event frustrates her ambition until she flees her mother's home in Brooklyn. She settles in Albuquerque, where a talented mentor opens gallery doors for her. When her daughter, Fiore, is thirteen, mother...
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Written as brush strokes applied to canvas, Portrait Beyond the Frame is the story of Baba Bonacour, a white woman, whose passion is painting. In Greenwich Village days before Kennedy's inauguration, she finds herself pregnant by an African-American man who has already left her. This event frustrates her ambition until she flees her mother's home in Brooklyn. She settles in Albuquerque, where a talented mentor opens gallery doors for her. When her daughter, Fiore, is thirteen, mother and child are reunited. Despite Fiore's tumultuous teen years, Baba's painting flourishes. Twenty-five years later Baba tells Fiore that she is bi-racial, causing a final riff between them. Baba, however, helps raise her granddaughter, Alba, who does not pass as easily as her mother. Alba is a tennis prodigy, and Baba is determined that she should be an elite athlete and know her origins. In order to thwart Baba, Fiore urges Alba to be more conventional. Every bit as singleminded as her grandmother and mother, Alba turns down a major tennis scholarship because she wants to be close to her boyfriend. Baba suffers through a series of disappointments, and the novel concludes on an uptick of possibilities.