The Passion Dream Book travels from the Italian Renaissance, when a girl spends her days spying on a young Michelangelo and experiences the divided love of wanting the artist and wanting to be the artist, to the early years of the twentieth century, when the novel follows Romy March, a descendant of the Renaissance girl, and Augustine Marks, who are both artists.

The novel is an imaginative mix of fact and fiction, history and story, about the two enduring, occasionally conflicting passions of love and work. As Romy March and Augustine Marks migrate from place to place, separately and together, their love is their home, and their home is each other.

The outsider lives they lead take them from one cultural scene to another: silent-era Hollywood, the Harlem Renaissance, Paris in the late 1920s, and back to the United States. The novel touches on the migratory habits of artists' colonies; the search for and creation of identity as an artist and a lover; and how one lives when tradition doesn't hold.