Stiltsville

Stiltsville

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3.59 of 5 stars 3.59  ·  rating details  ·  1,163 ratings  ·  297 reviews
One sunny morning in 1969, near the end of her first trip to Miami, twenty-six-year-old Frances Ellerby finds herself in a place called Stiltsville, a community of houses built on pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay.

It's the first time the Atlanta native has been out on the open water, and she's captivated. On the dock of a stilt house, with the dazzling skyline in the d...more
Hardcover, 310 pages
Published August 3rd 2010 by Harper (first published 2010)
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Leah
I'd read that this book would make me cry at the end, and as I approached the end I stubbornly decided I wouldn't cry, but my resistance was futile. I can still tear up thinking about the loveliness of the last few lines. This book follows a woman from the moment of meeting her future husband, through their marriage, their years of childrearing and beyond, and the writing is so compelling and vivid I felt I lived those years with her. Highly recommended.
Amy
Looking for the perfect end of summer read? Look no further than the debut novel Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel. Opening in 1969, in the small community of houses called Stitlsville, built on pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay, the reader is immediately captivated by the main character, Frances, as she meets the man that will become her husband. The young couple’s house in Stiltsville serves as an object lesson about the precarious nature of life, marriage, and the passage of time. Stiltsville...more
Laura
Stiltsville is firmly in the Anne Rivers Siddons and Maeve Binchey school: a saga (although this one is shorter than most) of a person's life. It's not deep reading, but a good solid beach read.

Frances' life is rather, well, unfixed. She seems to drift in and out of things - her job, her relationship with Dennis, her moving to Miami, her marriage, etc.. There's no sense that she's really passionate about anything that happens to her or her family. Even her husband Dennis' ALS and eventual death...more
emi Bevacqua
Story about 26 year old Frances who travels to a friend's wedding in Miami from her home in Atlanta. While there she is befriended by super cool Marse, a girl who is taller and prettier and sexier than her who is better at swimming and boating and fishing than she is, and who I kind of wish the book had been more about than Frances. Marse invites Frances to come stay with her, tells her about a boy named Dennis she has a crush on, and then all of a sudden he falls in love with Frances, and subse...more
Sara
Susanna writes makes you question whether this is actually a real love story or not. Because it's not a love story like you see in movies. It's like a for real love story, where two people fall in love and get married young, and they question whether it was the right decision or not, someone thinks about infidelity, and it's the every day problems of an ordinary couple raising a daughter.

You find yourself nodding your head along because everything is so true to what it's really like to be marri...more
Chris
Well-known librarian Nancy Pearl has suggested that readers are drawn into a story through four doorways: story, setting, language, and/or character. For setting and language lovers, Stiltsville may be a 5-star read. But those looking for appealing characters or a compelling plot will be disappointed. Daniel's main character, Frances, meanders through most of her life, experiencing the usual ups and downs of marriage and parenting. Even though Daniel conveys the emotions of a long marriage hones...more
marymurtz
I loved the oblique and understated way this book unfolded, the development of the characters and the plot building slowly but solidly as the narrator goes over the changes in her life since the first time she visited the stilt house near Miami. She goes with a friend she has just met at a wedding and falls for the man her friend is crushing on - eventually they marry and Frances (the narrator) describes friendships, family crises, her marriage and the way their lives, their city, their world -...more
Bob Mustin
I’d become jaded about modern American fiction, and the younger crop of fiction writers. What did they have to write about? I kept asking myself. Over the past couple of decades and until the past couple of years, we of the so-called middle class all lead pretty cush lives, leading to nothing much other than pettiness and banality. So, really, what was I to have expected of thirty- or forty-somethings who had sharpened their bland writer’s chops in MFA programs? But hoping beyond hope, I keep re...more
Sarah
Frances accepts an invitation to go to Stiltsville to attend a wedding, and she has no idea that this one action will change her future life. Stiltsville is a small community of houses, built on pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay. Whilst at Stiltsville, she meets her future husband, Dennis.

The book tells the story of Frances's life, from dating, marriage, motherhood, and it paints a story of Frances and Dennis's marriage. It doesn't paint a rosy picture of marriage, but instead, shows that ma...more
Leslie
Much has been said about this novel. That it, "stands out due to its lovely, unexpected normalcy,” that it has lush descriptions, honest characterization and that the language is quiet and compelling in its power. All of these things are true. This book is hard to put down and maybe one of the best I've read in months. All at once you want to get to the end but you don't want it to be over. Each event, an event that could happen in your own life, is purposefully and perfectly placed giving the b...more
Ali Murphy
This book was not what I expected at all. I was expecting light and fluffy. Instead, I found language that was clunky and ordinary and off putting. The first few pages I was disconcerted by the plainness of the story and the style of writing. But I quickly found that I wanted to read more. I wanted to know how Frances's story went. How did it all end? For me, it ended with a quiet contentedness about love and marriage, including my own.

I have often heard the phrase "marriage is hard" and it is a...more
mark
This IS women's Fiction - and also so obviously the product of creative writing workshops - all the i's dotted and the t's crossed. But, it lacks grit. There really is nothing here but a fairly boring, average life of an an American woman ... who gets married (once) has a child (one) who grows up. It begins in 1970 and runs through 2004. It takes place in Miami and covers that city's growth and historical events (but not the famous 2000 election.). The tone fluctuates between low grade depressio...more
Michelle
Story starting in the late 60s and spanning a marriage. At 300 pages, that's a lot of living to pack in. The book started slow for me. The style of writing reads less like a story and more like the recounting of something that happened. (It sounds like your mom telling you a story). Also the structure is weird. There are a lot of unnecessary flashbacks. For example, the daughter comes home crying from a slumber party. Then the author backs up and talks about the weeks leading to the slumber part...more
Lydia Presley
I love being surprised by a book. When I first cracked open Stiltsville and read the opening chapter, I formed an opinion of the book and was a little hesitant to move forward. The actions by the key character touched close to home for me and I didn't know if this was a book I'd be able to get into, let alone give a fair shot.

But then I kept reading, because I needed to know more. I needed to know why people were still talking about this book. Plus, there was something about Frances and her fri...more
Debbie Maskus
The premise of the story sounds like a great novel, but Daniel drags down the story with wanderings onto less traveled streets. One of the worst scenarios in the book has to do with daughter Margo at a slumber party, Margo calls her parents crying for them to come get her. After a huge detour, the reader discovers the reason for the tears. The story about the stilt house off the coast of Miami is interesting, as well as the events happening in Miami. BUT-Daniel sugar coats the story. I knew from...more
Emily
Someday, when I'm in love with a sweet-hearted, glowing god-like boy who looks good in swim trunks, I will understand why people grow attatched to places like this:



Until then, I am resentful. And check out library books. And resist owning cat(s). And fear the frickin' reaper.

So, yeah, this is one of those books I should never pick up because it involves family vacations, and an awesomely possible love story, and realistic job/work scenarios (work...today???...really???), and parenthood. WHAT??!...more
Wendy Scott
It's hard for me to say whether I loved this book because of its many parallels to my life or because of the story itself or a combination of the two.

Like the main character's daughter Margo, I spent many weekends and summer days at the Red House in Stiltsville as a kid in the 1970s and a bit into the 1980s and some of my favorite memories were made there. The author spent time at the same house and her description of the house in the book made it feel like I was walking through my memory. Every...more
Victoria Allman
Stiltsville, Susanna Daniel's debut novel, is a quiet storm of a novel about a man and woman and their life in Miami over a 30-year period. This is a look at life. Not in an edge-of-your-seat type way, but in a lyrical, tender, these-are-the-moments-of-a-marriage way. Each character is well fleshed out as is each scene.
Dennis and Francis met in their late twenties at Stiltsville, a part of Miami you have to see to believe. Daniels brings the setting to life for those who have not encountered St...more
Beth
This was an okay read for me. The book begins in 1969 when Frances finds herself in Stiltsville, where she meets Dennis and falls in love with him. I was drawn to their love story immediately. The story of their lives together goes on to them marrying and having a child. They go through several ordeals as a couple and parents. The house in Stiltsville starts out almost being a character in itself. There were times I was more concerned about the house on stilts than I was about Frances and what s...more
Keija
From page one, Daniel draws the reader into the exotic and glittery Miami milieu that makes up her debut novel's setting. In Frances, we have a narrator we can admire and sympathize with and cheer on--her voice is compelling in its even-toned compassion for the people around her. In a mere 300 pages, Daniel creates a rich and many-layered world around Frances and Dennis DuVal. Frances, a Georgia native, meets Dennis in Stiltsville, falls in love, and moves to Miami. In an instant, the trajectory...more
Katrina
May 17, 2011 Katrina rated it 2 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: Hardly Anyone
Recommended to Katrina by: 2010 Literacy Award Committee
Shelves: adult, fiction, girl-read
I am not a fan of life chronicling stories. My life is normal enough that I don’t need to spend my free time reading about other people’s normal lives. This story records all the mundane parts of life and marriage but, for me, that get’s very boring very quickly. I mean, my life is more interesting than Frances’s. Her life just seems so passionless. Or more accurately it wasn’t written very passionately. I did feel the love that Dennis and Frances shared but there just didn’t seem to be any fire...more
Ron
An astonishingly bad book in a genre that is by and large abysmal (see Daniel's love of Curtis Sittenfeld in order to see the dark depths of mediocrity from which this 'literature' springs). The characters are thinly drawn, unlikeable, needy to the point of pathetic co-dependence and almost wholly repulsive. One develops little interest in the most tragic of events, though most of what happens is bland and prosaic, and the few interesting characters introduced at the beginning are given short sh...more
Carly Thompson
Spanning from 1969 to the early part of the 21st century, Stiltsville is the story of a quiet life filled with a deep abiding love. Frances Ellerby travels to Miami in 1969 for a friend’s wedding. She finds herself spending a day in Stiltsville, a collection of houses built on pilings in Biscayne Bay. Frances falls in love with Dennis, a law student whose family owns one of the houses. She soon moves to Miami and marries Dennis. They raise a daughter, Margo, and deal with problems that face most...more
Laura
I love when I read an author's first book published and find it to be this good! There are many things I like about this book. The plot is well thought out. The characters are likable and engaging. The family goes through many challenges and trials, as real families do.

There aren't exactly chapters in this book, but more like sections, each labeled with a year. 1969, 1970, 1976, 1982, 1990, 1993. Even though the story skips years at a time, it was done in such a clever way that I never felt lik...more
Patty
Stiltsville
By
Suzanna Daniel


When I first read the reviews and praise and hype for this book I was eager to get it immediately. It sounded like my kind of a book and I wanted to read it as soon as possible. It was a bit of a slow read at first. I liked the story and was getting interested in the characters but I started to wonder why I wanted to read it…why did I bump all of my other books down to the bottom of my queue and choose this one? But soon I was caught up in the events in the lives of t...more
Melissa
NOTE: I listened to this book on audio

Ugh, this was torturous. I can't believe I made it through the whole thing. This book was about nothing and full of boring and unlikable characters. There's really no storyline, no point, no drama, no nothing. I don't get it.

The reader of the audio book didn't help; she's the type of person who pronounces the H in words like "what." [shiver]
Amanda
This is not the type of book that I am normally drawn to. I like my books a bit more strange, to have a bit more intrigue. Sometimes I say I don't like to read books that are "just" about people. This, however, was a treat to read, as it was written by a woman Jon and I know in Madison (mainly through poker and ultimate frisbee games with her husband).

I really enjoyed reading it and in fact read it very quickly. I thought the sections were paced absolutely perfectly -- setting up or hinting at s...more
Mayda
Susanna Daniel takes a look at the everyday lives of everyday people. Spanning about 25 years, we get a detailed, snapshot look at specific happenings in their lives. We learn about the characters as they go about dealing with some of the same successes and problems that confront us. Set against the background of Miami, the family-owned stilt house figures periodically in the story. Ms. Daniel does a credible job of portraying the characters of the protagonist and her husband. While some may cri...more
Mary
Susanna Daniel's first novel jumped out at me because I just read Swamplandia! last month and there is a similar collection of houses in that book called Stiltsville. But Stiltsville isn't nearly as rich and wonderful as Swamplandia!

The book's narrator, Frances, spends a weekend in Miami for a wedding and ends up making a new best friend and falling in love at a stilt house in Biscayne Bay. Over the years, she and her marriage both grow and change, evolving over time and encountering highs and l...more
McGuffy Morris
Stiltsville tells the story of a village of Southern Florida homes built on the water. More importantly, it is the story of a marriage, the friendship of two women, Frances and Marse, and how the effect of that friendship plays a major role in all of their lives.

The two women have different lives, making different choices, yet supporting each other in spite of differences. In fact, their friendship takes very unusual and unexpected turns, as do family relationships.

The community and area all cha...more
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Stiltsville (ebook)
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Stiltsville (Paperback)

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Author Susanna Daniel was born and raised in Miami, Florida, where she spent much of her childhood at her family’s stilt house in Biscayne Bay.

Her debut novel, Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham prize for best debut work published in 2010. Stiltsville was also named a 2011 Summer Reading List pick by Oprah.com, a Best Debut of 2010 by Amazon.com, a Best Book of 2010 by the Huffington Post, a...more
More about Susanna Daniel...

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