Lime

Melda Beaty has created a probing and insightful women’s fiction that uses the publicly glamorous and privately painful life of a supermodel to examine notions of beauty and domestic violence.
“Lime” centers on the life of Lime Prince, a green-eyed international supermodel of mixed Jamaican-Ethiopian heritage who lands the cover of Vogue and becomes the new face of haute couture. Though she takes the New York fashion world by storm, her sordid, violent past comes back to haunt her.
“Lime” traces back to her painful coming of age in England and America while trying to break into modeling. As a child, Lime is abused and abandoned by her Ethiopian mother and forced to live with her Ethiopian grandparents, but finally rescued by her half-Jamaican father. She finds a modeling agent who siphons off her profits and is later coerced into a sex scandal by her ex-husband, a Jamaican trumpet player.
Amidst the nonstop pressure of the fashion world and the painful memories of her upbringing, her one solace is her witty, no-nonsense best friend AJ. Yet AJ too becomes the victim of an atrocious act of violence committed by her ultra-possessive boyfriend. To respond to her friend’s victimization, Lime organizes an unprecedented national crusade to bring public attention to the innumerable acts of violence committed against women.
“Lime” is a gripping novel about the violence committed against women and the social and family pressures that encourage them to remain silent.