Just Jennifer

Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel (HarperCollins, August 2010)

Frances is visiting Miami for the first time in 1969.  She’s 26-years-old and has a banking job in Atlanta, but leads a predictable, but boring, life.  Her new friend Marse takes her out on the Biscayne Bay to a community known as Stiltsville, a group of houses built on pilings, rising up out of the bay.  She is immediately taken with these houses, but more so with the son of one of the owners, Dennis.  Frances finds herself uncharacteristically uprooting her life in Atlanta to visit Miami on a long-term basis to be nearer to Dennis.  Frances and Dennis marry; have a daughter; face job dissatisfaction, miscarriages and the usual ups-and-downs of marriage, all the while buoyed by the house in the bay.  Even though they live fulltime in the Coral Gables suburb of Miami, it is the ocean that beckons them, from which they draw their strength.  The setting is tropical and lush, but not paradise as Miami goes through a series of growing pains.  Stiltsville becomes a sustaining force in Frances and Dennis’s marriage and as long as Stiltsville survives, so will they.  A devastating storm foreshadows what this couple will have to face in their marriage.  Stiltsville is a beautifully told story about a marriage, as lyrical as the ocean itself, complex in its living, but simple in its being.