57 pages • 1 hour read
The Hotel Nantucket
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Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Cobblestone Telegraph”
This chapter is written in the first-person plural voice of the gossipy Nantucket residents. They are astounded that London billionaire Xavier Darling is renovating and reopening The Hotel Nantucket, a place that seems “beyond saving” because it’s haunted. Lizbet Keaton will become The Hotel Nantucket’s general manager. Lizbet has recently broken up with her boyfriend of 15 years, JJ O’Malley. They worked together at the Deck, a restaurant where JJ was a chef and Lizbet the publicist and creative director, and they broke up after Lizbet found sexts between JJ and the restaurant’s wine representative, Christina Cross. Lizbet worked at the Deck for 15 seasons, ever since she first arrived on Nantucket from Minnesota.
A 94-year-old man, Mint Benedict, is the son of the hotel’s former owner, Jackson Benedict. He was at the hotel from 1910-1922 and maintains that the renovation is doomed because the place is haunted, and he believes it is his father’s fault.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Fifth Key”
Lizbet Keaton is keen to start a new life since her old one with JJ ended dramatically. At the Deck’s annual end-of-summer party for seasonal staff, Lizbet went to take the group picture and discovered pornographic and sexually-explicit text messages between JJ and wine representative Christiana Cross. She immediately vowed to have nothing more to do with JJ.
She applies to be general manager of The Hotel Nantucket because it is the one place on the island where she has no memories of JJ. When Xavier accepts her offer, he tells her he bought this hotel because he is trying to impress women. One of the women he is hoping to impress is Shelly Carpenter, a notoriously fussy yet legendary reviewer who has never given any hotel the top rating of five keys. Xavier is determined that The Hotel Nantucket should be the only hotel with Carpenter’s five-key rating. Lizbet accepts the challenge.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Ghost Story”
This chapter shadows the perspective of the ghost chambermaid, Grace Hadley, who perished in August 1922 in a fire at the Hotel Nantucket when she was 19 years old. Grace was the owner Jackson Benedict’s mistress and was staying in the attic’s storage closet so that he would have easy access to her. Jack’s jealous wife, Dahlia, started the fire and locked Grace in the attic, killing her. When Jack failed to save her and no one knew her story, Grace felt she had unfinished business on Earth.
After Jack and Dahlia left, Grace continued to make trouble for the following owners when the hotel opened at intervals during the 1950s and 1980s. She haunted the guests she did not like, especially the ones who abused their positions of power. Most recently, Grace eavesdropped as high schoolers turned the hotel into a party place. She learned about their music and social media obsessions, and she got on fine until a girl named Esmé body-shamed one of her peers. Consequently, Grace, wearing her 1920s maid outfit, decided to haunt Esmé’s phone screen, causing her to faint. The high-school parties came to an end, and now Grace is alone and obscure again.
With the hotel reopening, Grace likes Lizbet Keaton for the “bright sparks of grit and resolution flying off her” and vows to support her (29).
Chapter 4 Summary: “Help Wanted”
Grace presides over Lizbet’s hiring interviews. The first to be interviewed is 22-year-old local girl Edith Robbins, who has come out of hotel administration school newly single. She wants to spend the summer with her bereaved mother and start adult life independently. Lizbet hires Edie for the front desk, and Grace gets good vibes from her. Then Lizbet hires regal-postured Magda English from the Virgin Islands as the head of housekeeping, and Adam and Raoul Wasserman-Ramirez, a married couple, as bellboys.
Grace has misgivings about the next interviewee, Alessandra Powell, who has extensive experience in European hotels. She half-heartedly alludes to studying romance languages at Stanford, bluffs that she has an interview at a rival hotel, and says that her references are retired or dead. Despite Grace’s reservations, Lizbet is impressed and hires Alessandra as the front desk manager. Magda’s nephew, Ezekiel “Zeke” English, appears much more genuine and explains that he is still grieving his mother’s death. While Lizbet worries he may be too laid back for the job, she hires him on the strength of his looks and relationship to Magda.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Opening Day”
On opening day, Xavier throws a wrench in the works of Lizbet’s teamwork plan by announcing that he will award the most outstanding team member $1,000 every week. There is also the question of a mystery chef, whom Xavier will not announce. When JJ shows up with roses, Lizbet fears it might be him. However, he gets down on one knee and proposes. Just as she is refusing him, the real chef, JJ’s idol Mario Subiaco, shows up. Mario is cocky but charming, saying that he will steal all of JJ’s customers. He hands Lizbet a delicious cocktail and, when she feigns nonchalance, names it after her: “The Heartbreaker” (54).
Magda, meanwhile, is surprised to find that her latest chambermaid is a preppy-looking kid named Chadwick Winslow, who summers in one of the richest areas on Nantucket Island. He applied for this job due to some sort of self-enforced penance. Magda receives a planter of stunning orchids from a mysterious admirer.
Edie would like to win Xavier’s prize, as she has hefty student loans to pay off. However, she considers that poised, bejeweled Alessandra may be a hot competitor. Edie eagerly receives Kimber Marsh, a walk-in guest with peacock blue hair and two kids, and even upgrades her to the luxurious Suite 114 for the entire summer. Lizbet is mad, however, when Kimber asks to pay in cash and brings a ferocious-looking pit bull called Doug.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Staff Secrets”
Lizbet manages to organize an advance payment from Kimber and reminds her staff that they ought to be cooperative rather than compete for Xavier’s bonus.
Chad is despised by his sister, Leith, after what he did, and she says there is no way to atone for it. He hopes to make things right with his job, even though his father is taking the legal route to make amends.
Meanwhile, Magda knows that Xavier is behaving like a schoolboy, “doing handstands and backflips” to capture her attention. The orchids are a gift from him (82). She met him on a cruise over 30 years ago on a night when her fortune changed.
Edie receives a Venmo request for $500 from Graydon, her ex-boyfriend. He has leverage over her because he has intimate videos of her and is now threatening to make them public. Edie is terrified of her bereaved mother, Love, seeing them. She feels she has no choice but to Venmo him the $500 she has in her bank account.
Grace assumes that Alessandra has demons inside her after she fails to react to the channel of cold air she sends down her back. Lizbet, meanwhile, finds out that Alessandra lied about having an interview at a rival hotel. She cannot help following Alessandra on her bike to Hulbert Avenue; however, Alessandra realizes that she is being followed. Lizbet wonders if Alessandra might be staying with the Bicks, a family she knows. When she learns that Michael Bick is alone on the island, Lizbet wonders if he is sleeping with Alessandra.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
The theme of The Hotel As Exchange Hub looms large in the six opening chapters, which address its opening and hiring staff. Indeed, even before the hotel opens, Hilderbrand builds the sense of Nantucket as a close-knit place where the locals love to gossip about each other. The collective voice in the opening chapter, which states that “none of us are prepared for the tornado of rumors that rolls up Main Street” (7) following the announcement that Xavier Darling is buying the haunted Hotel Nantucket, informs the reader that his scheme is daring, and it creates an excited tone. Hilderbrand establishes tension between Lizbet’s wish to distance herself from the ghost story by dismissing it and focusing on the renovation and Grace Hadley’s wish to participate and make herself known. The reader is also introduced to Grace, a ghost who steals Lizbet’s cap and a hotel dressing gown, who is determined to take full advantage of the hotel as an exchange hub and involve herself with the guests.
While Nantucket was a historically white, privileged seaside resort, Lizbet’s staff reflects the diversity of today’s America, featuring people from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Xavier Darling’s former employee Magda, one of the women he opened the hotel to impress, is Black, while white, rich-kid Chad becomes Magda’s employee, working as a housekeeper in a conscious attempt to atone for some as-yet unrevealed wrong he committed. While there is a trend toward equality, injustice is prevalent both in Grace’s feeling that her middle-class employers deemed her not worth rescuing from a fire and in Edie’s sense that Graydon, her ex-boyfriend who is blackmailing her with revenge porn, is “using his white-male privilege to get back at Edie for breaking up with him” (87). This imbalance sets the scene for a feminist reckoning in later parts of the book.
While the theme of Redressing Past Hauntings manifests as the novel develops, Hilderbrand uses the opening chapters to show how Lizbet and her staff throw themselves into the newness of their work as a means of escaping the past. Lizbet, for example, who has spent the year reeling from the Adultery and Betrayal her ex-boyfriend, JJ, inflicted on her, is keen to embrace a new image and identity for herself on the island. However, JJ’s crime haunts her when she suspects that she sees adultery even in the unlikeliest of places, such as the seemingly solid marriage of another Nantucket golden couple, Heidi and Michael Bick. Employee Alessandra Powell becomes embroiled in this theme, as Lizbet soon intuits that she has not been telling the whole truth and that she cannot trust her.
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