South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Miami’s past comes alive in ‘House on Biscayne Bay’
New residents and visitors have flocked to Florida in many waves, each group different in makeup but united in the desire for a fresh start whether for personal, business or political reasons.
Chanel Cleeton’s absorbing “The House on Biscayne Bay” touches on all these reasons while pulling together two distinct pairs of new residents in character-based plots with Miami itself and a lavish mansion also being characters themselves. Cleeton also weaves in the land boom bust of the late 1920s, greed and scams, which have seemingly always been part of the Florida landscape.
Following WWI, thousands settled in the Sunshine State believing they could make a fortune in this virtually untapped area.
The vision of being a business mogul attracted Robert Barnes and his reluctant wife, Anna, to the wilds of Miami in 1918. Robert is excited about Florida and its potential for the future; Anna is less so, immediately disliking the heat, the closeness of wildlife, the isolation in this undeveloped stretch of Miami that might as well be the end of the world, she thinks. Anna especially dislikes the huge mansion — the titular house on Biscayne Bay — that Robert starting building without Anna knowing while she was still at their New York City home.
Anna believes the 60-some room mansion, with a few hidden passages, is too big for two people without children. Larger than Vizcaya, his manse is still not big enough nor grand enough for Robert, who desperately wants others to be envious of him. He wants his “legacy” to be the largest house in South Florida, which he has named Marbrisa.
“The House on Biscayne Bay” seamlessly switches to the early 1940s when Carmen Acosta travels to Marbrisa from her home in Havana, Cuba, where her parents recently were killed in a car accident. Carmen is to live with her older sister, Carolina, and brother-in-law ,Asher Wyatt.
The sisters were never close but the 18-year-old Carmen has nowhere else to go and her father’s will puts her guardianship and inheritance under Asher until she is 21 years old or married, whichever comes first. Carmen immediately falls in love with Florida but is concerned about the uneasy relationship between Carolina and Asher, and that her sister appears to be depressed and doesn’t seem to want her there.
Cleeton skillfully alternates the stories between the two families, each haunted by murders, betrayals and the specter of the mansion that people believe is cursed. One character says that “oppressive opulence reigns” at this house on the bay, and another wonders how a place that looks so much like paradise could cause so much pain.
The Miami of the two eras comes alive as Cleeton delves into the area’s changes through the decades. Cleeton shows how Flagler’s railway turned Florida into a tourist destination, encouraging new towns to spring up along the coast during the early part of the 20th Century. References to the Biltmore Hotel and Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant, before it was called that, show the past’s relevance to the present.