57 pages • 1 hour read
Elin HilderbrandThe Hotel Nantucket
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Bad Reviews”
Xavier delivers the news that the first two reviews of the hotel were bad, so he is not going to award the $1,000 bonus this week. The first bad review was from a group of horny, middle-aged women who described Zeke the bellboy as “unaccommodating” and likely “behind some inexplicable phenomena that happened in our room on the final night of our stay” (100). Zeke’s “unaccommodating” behavior was repeatedly rejecting the women’s sexual advances and offers of free drinks and dinners because he wanted to be professional. He also prefers Yolanda Tolentino, the yoga instructor, who is rumored to be in love with Mario, the chef. In reality, Grace was bothered by how the women treated Zeke and decided to haunt their room by making their blinds not work and pouring freezing water from their taps.
The second bad review was from a disgruntled woman called Franny, who complained about having to wait a long time for her enormous amount of luggage to be taken up by Raoul. At the time, Raoul was engaged in the more critical task of looking for Wanda Marsh, Kimber Marsh’s little girl, who was haunting the fourth floor looking for the ghost she had heard about. Lizbet is alarmed to hear that the story of the ghost has gotten out. She realizes that she needs to hire a night concierge to run the lobby as she is exhausted from doing this alongside the day work.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Lie, Cheat and Steal”
While Lizbet interviews the fatherly figure of Richard Decameron for the night auditor job, Grace gets the sense that he is a “predator.” Richie is happy to work seven nights a week, and Lizbet is thrilled.
Alessandra, who met Michael Bick on the boat over to the island, has been living with him as his mistress while his family is away. Michael is the latest in Alessandra’s trajectory of millionaires that she has bedded in exchange for a luxe lifestyle. Alessandra grew up with her waitress mother, Valerie, in San Francisco, who used to steal from her lovers. Alessandra began to follow in Valerie’s footsteps, and at 18, she seduced Dr. Andrew Beecham and got a full year of classes and passage to Europe from him. As Michael’s wife and kids are due to come back, Alessandra must leave his mansion. She is annoyed at having to move on again and wishes she could find a man to keep for life. She prepares an arsenal of incriminating pictures of herself in Heidi’s house in case she needs them for blackmail. Then, she plants a Chanel eyeshadow in Heidi’s makeup drawer, a pair of crystal-studded stilettoes among her shoes, and a positive pregnancy test inside one of her books. Alessandra, meanwhile, will share an apartment with Raoul and Adam.
Chad has been assigned a cleaning partner called Bibi Evans, a single mother who tries on the guests’ expensive possessions. When a guest complains that a Fendi scarf has gone missing, Chad suspects Bibi but does not say anything.
Chapter 9 Summary “The Cobblestone Telegraph”
Richard Decameron has been spotted sleeping in his car by the beach, which suggests that he does not have a permanent residence on the island. He lies to Officer Dixon that he has been living at the hotel, and they strike an agreement that he will not be seen in his car by the beach.
Meanwhile, Heidi Bick tells her friend Lyric Layton that she suspects Michael has had an affair. Lyric, who felt that Michael made a pass at her on a previous occasion, is not shocked. However, when Heidi produces the evidence—a stranger’s Chanel eyeshadow—Lyric worries that Heidi will suspect her of being Michael’s mistress because she wears the same eyeshadow. She, therefore, tries to reassure Heidi and puts off sharing her own news that she is pregnant with her fourth child. Mysteriously, when Lyric goes hunting for her own pot of eyeshadow, she cannot find it.
At the Summer Street Church, Nancy Twine wonders how Magda English has the resources to put five $100 bills in the donation basket.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Last Friday of the Month: June”
Lizbet and her staff pore over Shelly Carpenter’s latest review of the Isthmus Hotel in New York. Although Carpenter was impressed by almost all aspects of her stay, the hotel missed out on the fifth key because a pen was not working, and the lights did not have a dimmer switch. Lizbet is nervous because there are far bigger problems at The Hotel Nantucket if Shelly comes to stay with them.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Blue Book”
By the end of June, Lizbet feels that she has more breathing space with Richie working nights. She is conscious of her lack of social life; her and JJ’s mutual friends from the Deck took his side. A guest called Mrs. Amesbury insists that Lizbet make her a reservation at the Deck for the Fourth of July. Christina, the former wine representative, answers and tells Lizbet that the Amesburys are 57th on the waiting list for a table at the Deck. Realizing that Christina has her old job as the front-of-house manager, Lizbet cannot help feeling heartbroken. She heads to the Blue Bar to drown her sorrows, and Petey, the bartender, hands her Mario’s cocktails and delicious culinary creations. Lizbet is about to leave to evade sexual harassment from a man called Brad Everett when Mario emerges. Lizbet is on the verge of tears at his gesture of generosity after the news about JJ and Christina. Mario offers to take Lizbet to dinner and suggests the Deck; while Lizbet initially thinks it is a joke, she accepts.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Graveyard Shift”
Grace is thrilled that someone is looking into what happened to her, even if that person is eight-year-old Wanda Marsh. Wanda has gone as far as dipping into the local archives to find an article from August 31, 1922, about what happened. Grace, who sees a copy of the article, is surprised to learn that no one knew she was living at the hotel.
Wanda directly addresses Grace and asks for some sign that she is there, perhaps a knock. Grace reluctantly obliges with “three short, matter-of-fact raps that cannot be mistaken for anything other than the supernatural” (165). Wanda is grateful.
On her night wanderings, Grace sees Kimber flirting with Richie, and we learn that he is severely in debt to his ex-wife and that she will not allow him to see his kids until he pays up. Kimber persuades Richie to come up to the fourth floor, where Grace went with Jack. However, Richie is afraid of heights, and Kimber feels rebuffed; the romantic plan is ruined. Grace then has the instinct to go to the second floor, where she finds big-spending guest Mr. Yamaguchi’s door open and Alessandra emerging from it.
Chapters 7-12 Analysis
In the second section of the novel, Hilderbrand develops her characters and their relationships and shows the difficulty of the challenge ahead of them: Winning the much coveted fifth key from Shelly Carpenter and satisfying their distant boss, Xavier. As Lizbet reads a review where Carpenter withholds a key for something as small as a broken pen, she despairs over the far greater problems at her own hotel, whose TravelTattler ratings plummet due to bad reviews from capricious, over-entitled guests. The theme of The Hotel as Exchange Hub develops as the alchemy between hotel staffers and guests produces a dynamic that replicates class divides. Zeke was unable to avoid a scathing review from the middle-aged woman who made unwanted sexual advances toward him and would not be satisfied unless he slept with her. The woman attempted to exercise her superior social standing to pressure Zeke into sex; when she was unsuccessful, she channeled her unmet desires and the sting of rejection into a negative review, showing the ways wealthy people can maintain the upper hand in service dynamics. Similarly, searching for a lost little girl instead of transporting luggage gets misconstrued as rudeness by a waiting guest. As such events are beyond the well-intentioned staff’s control, the reader shares Lizbet’s hopelessness regarding the hotel’s ability to score a rave review from Shelly and feels that it will be a matter of luck.
The theme of Adultery and Betrayal continues in this section, as we see experienced mistress Alessandra planting the seeds to frame Michael and secure blackmail money at a later date. However, Michael emerges as an equally unsavory character, as Hilderbrand shows that he is complicit in the affair and also the more secure party in it. Here, the class tensions emerge again; Michael, who has participated in an extramarital affair, can keep his position while Alessandra is forced to move on. Alessandra’s acts to undermine this—using props that he would overlook but would be immediately obvious to his wife, Heidi—are an attempt to steal the power back from a man who can summon and dismiss her at will.
By the end of this section, however, Heidi’s friend, Lyric Layton, begins to be implicated in the affair, and Alessandra brings her seductions to the hotel when she emerges from a guest’s room. This further threatens the reputation of the hotel by injecting it with an aura of sleaze, as do Kimber Marsh’s flirtations with night auditor Richie Decameron. Alessandra’s secret activities infiltrate her sense of self and cause low self-esteem, causing her to distance herself from Edie, whom she stereotypes as sweet and does not want to corrupt. Here, Alessandra’s protective tendencies reveal a new complexity to her character and suggest that she amounts to more than her seductions.
The theme of Redressing Past Hauntings also develops in this section, with Wanda taking an interest in Grace and searching for her in the hotel. This child’s moving gesture, which revokes adult fear of and prejudice against ghosts, is an important first step in Grace’s story coming to light. Both the ghost and the girl are lonely, and they become important companions as they witness each other’s existence in a world that might overlook them. Lizbet, for her part, realizes that she is still haunted by her breakup with JJ on learning that Christina, the woman he cheated on her with, has replaced her as front-of-house manager at the Deck. Although Lizbet threw herself into the newness of the Hotel Nantucket, her hard work was a poor foil for unfinished emotional business. Additionally, we see that while her work life is thriving, she has lost touch with old friends and become isolated. She needs to work hard to rebuild any kind of personal life; her presence in Mario Subiaco’s Blue Bar at the peak of her vulnerability signals that this is fated to change for her.
Related Titles
By Elin Hilderbrand
