It is almost officially summer, but it definitely already feels like summer here in the south! We have a couple of beach trips planned for the summer including Isle of Palms, SC and Duck, NC. Which means I am hunting down some great beach reads for those trips! Did I find a perfect beach read in The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hildebrand? I think I came pretty close! It has a 4.05/5 star rating on Goodreads and was fun read with a bit of drama mixed in.
It feels like it has been a while since I did a book review on here, but like always, I will start this review off with a spoiler-free summary and review and then finish it with a discussion for you to read once you have read the book yourself!
Lizbet Keaton is starting over. She just had a bad breakup but is hired as the general manager of the Hotel Nantucket. The Hotel Nantucket has a reputation to overcome despite it massive renovation and re-opening, but Lizbet believes she can make it successful to impress her billionaire boss, Xavier Darling and an anonymous travel influencer, Shelly Carpenter. Can Lizbet, trendy hotel restaurant, and the hotel renovations make up for the staff and guest drama, as well as the ghost who haunts the hotel?
What genre is The Hotel Nantucket? I don’t really know what to call it other than “cozy beach read novel”. It has a bit of romance, but it definitely is not a primarily romance book. But I’m not going to lie, this book did take me a few chapters to get into. Mostly because I was wondering where this book was going, ESPECIALLY once the ghost, Grace, was introduced. However, Grace’s character is not spooky, she actually adds a bit of comedy into the story.
Lizbet is the main character, but the story follows several other staff who work at the hotel, as well as a guest who stays at the hotel the entire summer. It didn’t feel like the book followed too many story lines, and there wasn’t any story lines that I was uninterested in. I would have maybe swapping out one character story line for Lizbet’s love interest in the story. I think I thought this book was going to be a bit more romance, and I think I would have enjoyed getting more of her love interest’s POV in the story!
If I am splitting hairs on a review, sometimes, it felt like the author was trying a bit too hard to make cultural references and it came off a little cringe instead of funny. Most of the time it was cute though!
I’m not going to pretend that this book was super deep with themes or messaging; however, the idea of it was nice. Lizbet wanted a fresh start and she was able to create an extremely successful hotel by making people feel like they were family and working hard, plus she found herself in a happy relationship by opening herself back up to love after an ugly long-term breakup.
The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Page 16
I actually really liked all of the characters in the book, and I liked that none of them were perfect, nor were they complete villains. Even the characters that you thought would be big villains had more layers to it than that and helped you understand where they were coming from– even if you didn’t completely agree with their actions.
Was I surprised by anything in this book? Not particularly. I wasn’t hugely shocked that Kimber was Shelley Carpenter, but she also was not my first guess.
I wish it gave us a tiny bit more romance at the end. It didn’t feel like there were any loose ends between Lizbet and Mario, but I felt like it would have been nice to give us a little bit more of their romance at the end.
Overall I really enjoyed The Hotel Nantucket. It is a very easy book to read and was able to hold my attention. But you know what The Hotel Nantucket excelled at? Being a fun read that made me absolutely desperate to visit Nantucket.
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