The Hotel Nantucket

Most of the Hotel Nantucket’s staff members have secrets that haunt them. Over the course of the summer, they face these secrets head-on and become stronger characters with more open relationships with the world.

Ironically, Grace, the hotel’s resident ghost, is also haunted; she deeply feels the injustice done to her by the hotel’s original owners and is angry that no one knows the true story of her murder. When she was exposed to modern high schoolers who used the derelict Hotel Nantucket as a party place, she learned about modern problems and social justice, reinforcing her belief that “every human being had dignity, even the maid/mistress kept in the attic closet” (27). During the summer, Grace stands up for herself by bonding with others. She has the luck to find an accomplice in eight-year-old Wanda, who sleuths out her presence and story, resulting in an article about Grace being published in the local paper.

Grace’s change in fortune from being banished and obscure—both in life as a maid and in death as a ghost—to being recognized and celebrated, encourages her to participate in hotel life and even take an activist role, intervening when a guest tries to sexually assault Alessandra and promoting a couple’s sexual healing. Grace’s newfound sense of purpose and belonging is demonstrated at the end of the novel, when she uses the freedom acquired by Jackson Benedict’s confession of guilt regarding her death to stay at the hotel. Thus, while Grace has come to terms with the past, she no longer needs to escape it, and makes a new life for herself in the hotel.

In the human realm, main character Lizbet is haunted by her ex-boyfriend JJ’s betrayal, which she discovered at the end of the previous summer. While Lizbet has gone through all the motions of moving on, scoring a new look, job, and mission in the process, it is not until she begins a new relationship with Mario that she is forced to face the trauma of her grief. While she has been reciting the Socrates quote that “the secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new,” acknowledging the pain and loss of her old life rather than ignoring it enables her to start again in a new relationship (14). Lizbet’s unresolved trauma from JJ’s betrayal is evident when she erroneously pieces together evidence that Mario is dating Yolanda. She also fleetingly entertains getting back together with a remorseful JJ over starting something new with Mario, as she unconsciously seeks safety in the relationship she already knows. However, the sight of Yolanda with another kitchen staffer, Beatriz, proves to Lizbet that the past is in the past, and she can take a chance on a greater love with Mario.

Edie and Alessandra are also haunted by their pasts. In Edie’s case, it is the recent past, following her breakup with her ex-boyfriend Graydon and his threats of revenge porn. Demands for expensive payments alongside images of Pocky, a prop that was used in one of the sexual games Graydon coerced Edie into, flash on her phone, reminding her that she cannot fully move on and has a debt to pay from her past. She imagines that the mosaic of her life would “be cute around the edges—bits of rose-colored glass and hand-painted bone china—but in the middle would be a chunk of tarry asphalt, black and oozing” (274). This image exemplifies how Graydon’s continued unwanted presence in her life and the threat he represents for her future blight her formerly confident sense of self.

Ironically, it is Alessandra, whose own self-image has been clouded by her clandestine interactions with men, who shows Edie her power and makes the phone call that ends the blackmail, propelling Edie firmly into the present. Here, Hilderbrand shows how women can support each other to heal from past aggressions. As a woman-run enterprise, The Hotel Nantucket changes its reputation from 100 years ago, when a maid who represented her lover’s shame was left to burn, to become a place where women can heal and grow stronger together.