THE HOTEL NANTUCKET (2022)
By Erin Hilderbrand
Little, Brown, & Company, 401 pages.
★★★★
Erin Hilderbrand is certainly a regional writer given that most of her 28 books have been set on the island of Nantucket. It’s appropriate that I post this review on the first day of summer, as The Hotel Nantucket is a beach-read novel. Hilderbrand is a mass market writer whose books are more genre-oriented than literary in style. If your preferences run to the latter, you might not be tempted but I can say that it’s more than candy floss. Hilderbrand entertains with heavy-on-relationships books and characters with depth. You won’t like everyone in this novel, but you will get to know them. Another feature to note is that the book runs 401 pages, but 46 are in the form of a guidebook for those traveling to this tony summer playground. It even comes with a suggested music playlist.
The Hotel Nantucket is about the tensions between the rich and those who cater to them. The novel’s namesake establishment is a faded grand old hotel about to get a serious makeover, courtesy of Xavier Darling, a rich Brit, who sinks $32 million into rehabbing it. His stated goal is to obtain a rare 5-key rating, though he also has an ulterior motive that is yours to discover. Call it a luxury venue on steroids—a decadent bar, free mini bars that are restocked every three days, artisan-woven blankets and linens, a sauna, a yoga studio, gourmet food, hydrangea blue décor, a requisite ghost, and the expectation that staff must keep the place spotless and kowtow to every customer whim. Darling wants the hotel to be so exclusive that anyone who doesn’t book way in advance can’t stay or eat there, no matter how fat their wallet.
Making this work means hiring the “right” staff, but not necessarily a conventional one. Lizbet Keaton comes aboard as manager and is placed in charge of hiring after dissolving her partnership with her unfaithful boyfriend with whom she ran the island’s most-popular restaurant. Good luck keeping control over exotic gold-digger Alessander Powell, celebrity chef Mario Subacio, shady night auditor Richie Decameron, elderly housekeeper Magda English, or naïve clerk Edie Robbins who is drowning in student debt as well as being blackmailed by her former boyfriend. It’s a crew so fraught with baggage that one of its most stable members is “Long Shot” Chad Winslow, a rich Bucknell kid who takes a job as a maid as self-atonement for a foolish thing he did during a college party. His father, Paul, simply can’t comprehend why he’d debase himself as a maid. There are several out gay characters as well, but none whose motives are transparent.
Darling bribes his staff by handing out weekly bonuses, though it has a boomerang effect of pitting them against each other. But Darling is a determined man, even though he never leaves London. The key to the fifth key, as it were, is to have everything shipshape in case blogger Shelly Carpenter of Hotel Confidential fame pays a visit. That too is a problem; her identity is a better-kept secret than U.S. nuclear codes. This means a staff on edge—or perhaps “more” on edge since who is sleeping with whom enters the plot—because even a minor slip up like a piece of litter or a misunderstanding with a customer might take place with or in the presence of Carpenter. You can imagine that some of the guests have weird quirks and agendas. There is, to name one, Kimber Marsh who arrives with her chess prodigy son Louie, inquisitive daughter Wanda, and their pit bull Doug. Marsh insists on stashing a huge amount of money in a hotel safe and withdraws thousands each week to pay their freight in cash.
If this sounds like a potboiler, it is! It’s also a look at the entitled, clueless toffs who descend on places like Nantucket as if no one lives there when summer ends. It will give you an appreciation for those who exercise stoic self-restraint among those who think nothing of $100 tips for bellhops. The flip side is that they also think nothing of blaming them for their own errors or demanding dismissal for perceived slights.
This being a summer read, you can expect a (relatively) chirpy ending. You might even be tempted to pay Nantucket a visit. Maybe in offseason. At a reasonably priced hotel.
Rob Weir
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