Bill Elliott, 60, is the owner of The Nantucket Beach Club and Hotel. He inherited the property and business from his father and intends to pass it on to his daughter, Cecily. His health makes this desire more urgent: Bill has recently experienced heart problems and knows that he will need to retire soon, though he is initially confident that Mack will help Cecily take over ownership.

Bill likes to read Robert Frost’s poetry to avoid emotional problems, relying on his wife, Therese, to handle them. Bill is devoted to her, Cecily, and Mack, but often fails to investigate their emotional needs, making several assumptions about what they want or expect. Bill tends to feel betrayed by people who act in ways that do not align with his own plans; he reacts angrily when Cecily goes to Brazil and when Mack takes an offer with the Texas Rangers. In the end, however, Bill is forgiving and tries to make amends.

Therese, 58, appreciates beauty and order and makes sure the hotel maintains its welcoming ambiance. She is more emotionally involved with the guests than Bill is and actively seeks to solve their problems, as in her response to Leo Hearn and his sons. Therese has a noticeable white streak in her red hair, which occurred as a stress response to the death of her first child, a stillborn boy named W. T. This event, which occurred 28 years before, has shaped the Elliotts’ emotional life and explains why Bill finds loss so difficult and why Therese is so insistent that Cecily should marry Mack. Finding One’s Way Through Grief and Anger is thus at the heart of the Elliotts’ storyline.

Maribel is a very pretty woman in her mid-twenties who works at the library. She is a kind person and an understanding friend who is well-liked by most people except for Therese, who sees her as an obstacle to her plan for a Cecily-Mack union. After dating Mack for six years and living with him for three, Maribel is growing increasingly annoyed with his reluctance to marry: Her upbringing as the daughter of a single mother causes her to wish for a stable home, which will reassure not only Maribel herself but also her mother.

Maribel tries to be proactive in her relationship but understands that Mack is fearful of commitment. Moreover, despite her devotion to Mack, Maribel is attracted to Jem. She likes how much Jem focuses on her, which reminds her of her own attention to Mack. Though generally patient, Maribel can lose her temper, as she does twice in fights with Mack—first when she finds out about Mack’s infidelity with Andrea Krane and then when he refuses to stay with her during the hurricane. Eventually, Maribel comes to terms with the fact that Mack is not interested in marriage and accepts that her love will not change him. She realizes that she’s been seeking stability because of her father’s abandonment and decides to take a chance with Jem instead, letting love come to her rather than chasing it. Even though she agrees to go with Jem to California, she thinks that Mack and she may meet again in the future and is sorry to say goodbye to him, demonstrating the complexity of their relationship.

Jem, a 23-year-old college graduate, comes to work at the hotel because he doesn’t want to work at his father’s bar. Jem is very good-looking and earnest, as well as eager to make his own way as an actor’s agent in California. He’s conflicted about leaving his family for California, but Lacey insists that he can’t worry too much about parental approval. His character arc centers on his growing self-assurance.

Jem’s relationship with Maribel plays a key role in this. When the two meet, he is immediately attracted to her. Throughout the summer, he gradually falls in love with Maribel and grows increasingly disapproving of how Mack treats her. When she and Mack get back together for a time, Jem is broken-hearted and anxious to leave Nantucket. However, a brief but meaningful friendship with Neil, a hotel guest, dramatically changes him: Neil’s cancer diagnosis rattles Jem, and he realizes that he must be more active—that life is about embracing the moment and the people one encounters. Neil’s faith, symbolized by a monetary investment in Jem’s future, allows Jem to gain confidence: He establishes that he wants more from his relationship with Maribel and then rejects his parents’ disapproval and heads to California. Jem, like Mack, breaks away from the things holding him back and becomes responsible for himself.

Vance, 30, is a handsome African American man with a shaved head. Vance begins the novel bitter toward Mack because the latter is the manager of the hotel, a position for which Vance was once supposed to interview. Vance is head bellman and a hard worker who respects other employees; despite his anger toward Mack, his overall good nature manifests in his care for Maribel and kindness to Love, whom he warns about Arthur Beebe.

Vance’s relationship with Love draws out nuances in his characterization while also resulting in growth. It emerges that Vance is a tender lover with a wide range of interests: “[H]e clammed and fished, and scalloped in the fall; he could play rag tunes on the piano. He traveled all through Southeast Asia and he knew fifty Thai words” (215). Vance is also a published writer and has a university degree. Vance’s fraught relationship with Mack escalates when he catches Mack in a sexual encounter with Andrea and threatens him at gunpoint. Later, Vance regrets this choice and realizes that it plays into racist stereotypes about African American men. He wants to be better than that—for himself, but also for Love and their expected child: Vance is very much smitten with Love, and she opens him up to letting go of his resentments.

Love, 40, is living in Aspen, Colorado, and thinking about having a baby, when she meets Bill, who invites her to work at the hotel. She takes him up on the offer with the hope of meeting someone to impregnate her. Love is athletic and rollerblades to work.

At first, Love is solely committed to having a child and puts herself into semi-dangerous situations with guests to pursue her goal, as with Arthur Beebe. Subconsciously, however, Love wants to be loved and cared for and is seeking a relationship as well as motherhood. When she and Vance start to grow closer, she pushes him away in a panic, unready to modify her vision of the future. However, the loss of Lacey propels Love to tell the truth about her pregnancy, and Vance’s joy helps her recognize her own feelings; she realizes that she wants to “be with him, she want[s] to know him and she want[s] him to father her child, in every sense” (331). In the concluding chapters, Love embraces happiness and commitment and feels like she’s “growing up.”

Cecily, 18, has just graduated from high school, but her father’s heart condition means that he will have to retire soon, and he wants her to run the family hotel when he does. Cecily resists this future, in part because she is in love with Gabriel da Silva, a boy from Brazil. Although she’s gotten into the University of Virginia, she plans to delay entry for a year to travel with Gabriel and is saving money to buy a plane ticket to meet him in Rio de Janeiro. While there are hints that Cecily has feelings for Mack as well, those feelings are complicated by her mother’s wish that the two of them will start a relationship and care for the hotel together.

Cecily’s arc focuses on her efforts to exert agency independent of her parents. When she tries to talk to her parents about her own wishes, which conflict with their plans, they call her childish. She views their negative response as manipulation and seizes the chance to go to Brazil when she can. However, a month later, Cecily has a change of heart and calls Mack to say that she has broken up with Gabriel and is coming home. She asserts that she is no longer a “kid,” and he challenges her to “[c]ome home and prove it” (356), underscoring that her main struggles have involved maturity and independence: Cecily’s parents may have been overly protective, but in some respects, they understood her needs and wishes more clearly than she Cecily herself. Having learned more about herself, she is now more mature and better poised to pursue a relationship with Mack.

Lacey Gardner, 88, is an important fixture at the Beach Club. She is an accomplished woman who is the oldest living graduate of Radcliffe College. She’s been coming to the hotel since 1945, and Bill’s father granted her the cottage behind the Beach club in his will. Lacey was married to a man named Maximillian and deeply loved him, but the pair could not have children. Lacey’s only conflict with her husband centered on his refusal to adopt, leaving her alone after his death in 1986. This was the same year that Mack Petersen came to Nantucket; his physical resemblance to Maximillian and his kindness endeared him to Lacey. Lacey becomes Mack’s largest supporter, and she sees him as her son. She rewards his kindness to her by leaving him her cottage in her will, fully understanding his desire for a home.

Lacey is outspoken and gives advice freely to both Mack and other characters. For example, she tells Jem that “the earlier [he] stop[s] hoping for [parental approval], the happier [he’ll] be” (73), and she approves of Cecily running after Gabriel. She also truthfully comments on Mack’s dilemma regarding Maribel and Andrea, stating, “Call me crazy but I don’t think you love either one” (132). Lacey is revered and well-liked, and the majority of the Beach Club community mourns her passing.