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Issue link: https://digital.miamilivingmagazine.com/i/1541986
That escape never came. A canoe trip up the Loxahatchee River changed everything, revealing a Florida far richer, wilder, and more ancient than I had imagined. Our true neighbors were not the CEOs and socialites of The Shiny Sheet, but the three-hundred-pound sea turtles nesting on our beach—prehistoric creatures whose quiet majesty reoriented the world around us. Yet life in Florida is never lived without a watchful eye on the horizon. Hurricanes, real or imagined, shape the rhythms of all who settle here. Even the word itself—hurakan, meaning “god of the storm”—echoes through my novel Where Snowbirds Play, threading myth and meteorology into the story’s emotional landscape. Still, Palm Beach glittered on. Its winter season spun through grand ballrooms and storied private clubs, where beauty came with an entrance fee of near-mythic proportions—and where leaving was even harder than joining. It wasn’t until I befriended one of its brightest luminaries, the indomitable doyenne who would inspire my character Vanessa Vine, that I began to see the island with a writer’s clarity. Beneath its elegance lay a world of hidden allegiances, shifting power, and lives lived at once publicly and invisibly. This duality—real and imagined, glamorous and mysterious—became the compass for Where Snowbirds Play, a novel set in 1991, when the sea turtles faced imminent extinction and the island’s social world operated by rules both explicit and unspoken. Through the eyes of an idealistic English marine biologist, I sought to portray a place where nothing is quite what it seems, and where the most revealing truths often hide in plain sight. Palm Beach can be known, but only if one looks beyond its gleam. Its sandy beaches, coral reefs,