The Hotel Nantucket

Online life permeates Hilderbrand’s novel and is an important motif, both in terms of Hilderbrand’s writing style and crucial plot points. The real space of an old-timey seaside resort like Nantucket, set in its architecture and aesthetic, is juxtaposed with content about it online, which ranges from TravelTattler reviews to Instagram and Snapchat posts. This gives the impression that the virtual space around the experience of The Hotel Nantucket is continually shifting in line with people’s views on it. The online space infiltrates the characters’ lives and threatens to change them irrevocably, especially in the sexual blackmail perpetrated by Alessandra and Edie’s ex-boyfriend. Even Grace, the ghost, becomes familiar with the new social media empire and haunts a bully’s phone with a holographic image of herself breathing fire, because she knows that this is the best way to spook a young, 21st-century woman.

The infidelity that propels Lizbet to change her life and become the Hotel Nantucket’s manager is virtual one, composed of sexually-explicit text messages and images sent between JJ and Christina. Hilderbrand juxtaposes the reassuring intimacy of Lizbet using JJ’s password—her birth date—to take the annual Deck end-of-summer picture with the betrayal lurking in the same device.