The Five-Star Weekend

The narrator, a first-person plural collective perspective of the Nantucket locals, gossips about the happenings on the island as the summer season approaches. Providing updates on characters from Elin Hilderbrand’s previous novels, the narrator eventually speculates about Hollis Shaw’s planned five-star weekend. The islanders prefer to lay personal claim to the well-known food blogger. Hollis grew up in Nantucket’s Squam neighborhood. After her mother died while Hollis was a toddler, the Nantucket residents assisted Hollis’s father, Tom, in raising Hollis. Although proud, the community missed Hollis while she attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They followed Hollis’s career as an assistant food editor for Boston magazine.

Hollis married Matthew Madden, a world-renowned cardiac surgeon, and the couple moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, with their daughter, Caroline. Hollis inherited Tom’s modest house after his death, and she pushed the home to a corner of the property before building a larger, more opulent house. In doing so, Hollis separated herself from the permanent Nantucket community while becoming a “summer person”—an affluent individual residing on the island only in the summer and primarily living off-island.

Although the islanders have mixed feelings about Hollis’s elevated social standing, they delight in watching her success as a food blogger.