Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel

What to say about Stiltsville....my goodness, what to say.  Stiltsville is the debut novel of author, Susanna Daniel.  It is a book that is deceptively simple.  It tells the story of a woman and a family and a city, Miami, and a way of life that has for the most part ended.  The setting is vivid and lush, Miami not like you see in the flyovers on TV today, but Miami of the past.  But it is mostly the story of a woman and a marriage and her life during that time - simple and powerful.

Frances Ellerby visits Miami for the first time in 1969, attending the wedding of a friend.  She meets a woman who will remain one of her best friends throughout her life, Marse, and she meets the man who will be her husband, Dennis DuVal.  Marse takes Frances out to a place called Stiltsville, a fascinating community of houses built on pilings in Biscayne Bay.  They visit Marse's brother and his friend, Dennis, and so begins the story of Frances' life with a man, a vacation house in Stiltsville, and a future that she didn't suspect she would live.  Frances and Dennis marry and have a daughter, Margo.  They work and play and spend time on the water and at their Stiltsville home.  There are ups and downs, times of plenty and lean times, weather problems, marriage problems, parenting problems, and grave illness.  All of these times are told by Frances and I read her narrative like I was reading a diary, slowly, carefully, with laughter and with tears.  It was very moving to me.

Susanna Daniel has a gift of description and she uses it well in Stiltsville.  The setting comes alive and the reader feels like swatting at mosquitoes, wiping away the perspiration from the sun or humidity, or slathering on sunscreen.  The Florida landscape appears again and again in various guises.  The community of Stiltsville, which actually exists, is a fascinating place and I found it rather unnerving to think of sleeping above water in a house built on stilts.  The author is a native Floridian and spent time in her childhood at her own family's stilt home in Biscayne Bay.  She knows of what she speaks.

I was very drawn to several of the characters.  First of all, Frances, probably because her life has some similarities to my own.  I nodded my head and sympathized through her worries and traumas parenting an only child.  I also loved Dennis, Frances' husband.  There were certain aspects of his character that reminded me of men I have known. including my own husband.  Their marriage survives many stresses, not without turmoil and compromise, but with much love.  The last quarter of the book impacted me hugely.  I share one quote from Frances:

I lived in Miami through scandals and riots, through dozens of tropical storms and one devastating hurricane, through the Mariel boat lift and the cocaine cowboys.  Outside Florida, I've never met anyone else who lived in Miami or cared to, or even anyone who is not somewhat surprised to hear that I lived there for half of my life.  Perhaps what is still more surprising to me about Miami is that in spite of its lurid excesses and unreal beauty and unreal ugliness, it was possible for me, a girl from Georgia, to create a life there.  Overall, an excellent life.  A life I knew even as I was living it, I would miss when it came to an end.

Thank you so much to Lisa of TLC Book Tours for letting me be a part of this blog tour and sending me a copy of the book for review.  I am most appreciative.  Other tour stops can be found here.