64 pages • 2 hours read
Joyce MaynardThe Bird Hotel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A 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 62-83Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 62 Summary: “Swimming Lessons”
Irene has never forgotten how Diana’s boyfriend, Daniel, then Lenny, tried to get her over her fear of water by throwing her in. She’s been living by the lake for seven years now and asks Pablito, the fisherman, to teach her how to swim. Pablito catches his fish by harpooning, which is efficient but also dangerous.
Chapter 63 Summary: “One Thing About Having an Operator for a Friend”
Irene has dinner at least once a week with Gus and Dora and their two children. They are the closest thing she has to family. Irene recognizes and accepts Gus’s flaws and failings: “I might know he was selling me a bill of goods, but I bought it anyway, as a sister might, the misbehavior of a loveable if feckless brother” (255).
Chapter 64 Summary: “An Unlikely Mother”
A new woman comes to town, Raya Sunshine. She is older, skinny, and owns nothing. She learns that one of Wade’s employees is nursing his newborn son, but the other twin, Alicia, gets little attention. Raya begins taking care of Alicia, then asks to keep her. She makes money crocheting bikini tops to sell to tourists, and she and Alicia are never apart.
Chapter 65 Summary: “Raising a Baby on Macramé”
Alicia is a happy baby and, observing them, Irene thinks, “Life worked better for them than it did in many families” (263). All they need is one another.
Chapter 66 Summary: “A Fish Without a Bicycle”
Amalia teaches Clarinda to make bags in order to provide for herself, and she shares the expression, adapted from Gloria Steinem, that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Watching Clarinda flirting with the Lizard Men as she tries to sell them a bag, Irene is disturbed. She declares she is buying the bag and gets Clarinda away.
Chapter 67 Summary: “Five-Star Rating”
The hotel is looking good, with many new renovations, but the money Leila left is gone. Then a travel writer stays and gives her a five-star review, and the bookings improve.
Chapter 68 Summary: “A Buyer Shows Up”
A man who owns a chain of boutique hotels offers to buy La Llorona. Irene believes he will try to preserve what Leila built, so she signs the papers to sell.
Chapter 69 Summary: “God Must Be Angry”
A storm hits, with water pouring down the hillside. The wind does a great deal of damage to the hotel and property.
Chapter 70 Summary: “The Birds Sang Louder”
Irene surveys the damage to the hotel and Leila’s gardens. The village is damaged as well, but only one person died. Irene thinks the birds are singing even louder than usual. The buyer cancels the deal, and Irene feels relieved, although she has to cancel many bookings while they undertake repairs. Everyone pitches in to help, except for Gus, who stops coming around.
Chapter 71 Summary: “A Tortilla Saleswoman in the Road”
Irene decides to spend her money replanting Leila’s gardens, reasoning, “The only way I’d ever restore La Llorona would be with flowers” (278). She feels an obligation to maintain what Leila built. When she returns to the hotel, Irene hires women from the village to help her unload the plants. The women enjoy the task. As she commences repairs, Irene realizes, “It came to me that I wasn’t going anywhere else after all” (281).
Chapter 72 Summary: “A School Made From Soda Bottles”
The villagers work together to make repairs and adapt to the new river flowing through their town. While the native residents help one another, the gringos hoard supplies and sell them at a markup. One of them tries to convince nursing mothers to switch to formula. Irene thinks about the extremes that the town brings out “in its weather, its topography, and people—that range of human behavior that ran the gamut from worst to best, ugly to beautiful” (282). Amalia and her army of children set out collecting trash and making eco-blocks to rebuild.
Chapter 73 Summary: “Must Be Some Herb”
Gus returns and sees Irene open a letter from Jun Lan reporting that she had a second baby. Irene tells Gus about the herb, and he asks where it grows.
Chapter 74 Summary: “An Unexpected Art Lover”
Irene continues with her swimming lessons. Dora visits and asks to see Irene’s picture of the herb Jun Lan found.
Chapter 75 Summary: “A No-Hands Game”
Gus gets in a fight with a thief, who bites his hand, causing a wound that becomes infected. Dora calls Irene from the hospital asking for help. Gus’s hand is amputated to save his life.
Chapter 76 Summary: “I’m a Fish”
Irene offers to send Clarinda to school in a nearby city. She agrees to have a lunch to send with Clarinda each morning. As they walk past Harold’s café, with the Lizard Men watching, Clarinda says she’s a fish, her version of the Gloria Steinem quote.
Chapter 77 Summary: “King Bass”
Pablito brings Irene a black bass he’s been trying to catch for years and tells her about the underwater Mayan village his father discovered in the lake. They reported the find, and experts from the university of San Felipe came to investigate; then others came to study and explore. Pablito’s father was never given credit for the discovery. Pablito says he’ll return for an even bigger fish he saw, but he dies in the attempt. His harpoon is recovered, and his wife saves it for their son.
Chapter 78 Summary: “In Appreciation for Services Rendered”
Irene is visited by a lawyer and learns that, when she asked Dora to handle the hotel paperwork for her, Dora had Irene sign a clause giving all the property of La Llorona to Dora.
Chapter 79 Summary: “The Wall”c
Irene consults a lawyer who confirms that the contract is valid. She suggests that Irene offer to rent the half of the land containing the hotel. Irene feels that part of her is being amputated, like Gus’s hand. Friends come to help her transplant flowers she wants to keep, though she’ll lose the jocote tree. Raya says philosophically that all one can do is be grateful for what one has. Gus and Dora hire workers to build an ugly cement wall across the property. Amalia says they can paint a mural on it. Irene asks Maria how Leila felt about Gus and learns that Gus was the foreigner who had cheated her and left her in debt. When Gus came around after Leila died, Maria and Luis didn’t feel it was their place to say anything. Irene reflects, “I’d let Leila’s beloved home fall into the hands of the very people who’d cheated her” (307).
Chapter 80 Summary: “A Red Light-Bulb”
Slowly, Irene starts to recover from the Gus and Dora Heist. Gus and Dora build an ugly cinder block house on their new property and raze Leila’s plants to create terraces for a crop. They install a red light in the jocote tree that they keep on all night, obscuring Irene’s view of the night sky.
Chapter 81 Summary: “Always the Volcano”
Irene thinks that her world has shrunk, but in another way, it has expanded. She feels that time moves differently in La Esperanza. Travelers pass through, and foreigners come in with ways to make money, but life for the Indigenous population still resembles their ancestral ways. Irene thinks, “The birds sang just the same as they ever did” (312). She looks around and sees the children she knows growing up, including Walter and Alicia. Mirabel seems unhappy, and her waist is beginning to thicken. The one constant seems to be the volcano.
Chapter 82 Summary: “The Deep Heart’s Core”
Irene is 39. She receives a letter from Jerome saying that he is married and has a family, but it took him a long time to get over Irene. He quotes the William Butler Yeats poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and Irene reflects that “in a certain way I must have been looking for this lake all my life” (315).
Chapter 83 Summary: “Looking Out for the Family”
The rage Irene felt at Gus and Dora for taking her property has turned to a dull ache by the time she runs into them at the dock. She confronts them and asks why it took them so long to take away her property, and why they pretended to be her friends. She realizes it was because Gus was using her capital to pay for the repairs and improvements he wanted. Dora and Gus claim that Leila should have left the property to them, not Irene, and they were just taking what they were due. Gus says they were looking out for their family, which Irene wouldn’t know about.
Chapters 62-83 Analysis
These chapters present a further study of life in La Esperanza, portraying the quiet rhythms and looking more deeply at the dangers beneath. Irene reflects on the village as a blend, if not a balance, of extremes, with the best and worst of human nature on display, ugliness alongside beauty, a balance suggested in previous chapters also. The theme of resilience resounds in the episode of the damaging storm and the months the villagers spend rebuilding. Yet, at the same time, Irene also sees a stoicism to this approach: They really have no choice but to rebuild and keep going. Irene will exhibit the same stoic determination in response to what she calls the Gus and Dora Heist.
This balance between extremes prevails in the dramatic structure also, as Maynard alternates small triumphs and moments of connection or beauty with the disasters that punctuate this section. Clarinda’s success at school is one high point; so is Raya’s adoption of Alicia, which returns to the theme of The Search for Family that winds through the novel. Jun Lan’s second child is another gift from La Llorona. Irene’s feeling that Gus, Dora, and their children are a family to her proves one further example of the growth and renewal that La Llorona has brought her. The healing power of family is underlined when Jerome writes about his wife and child, which reflects on what Irene lost in the beginning of the novel. When Gus tells Irene that she doesn’t understand family, the insult is ironic in that it comes from the man who pretended friendliness while preparing to stab her in the back. By this point, Irene understands that family is more than just blood kinship: It also means all the people she chooses to care for and to trust. Gus’s words show the cruelty of those out to exploit others as a stark contrast to the generosity shared among the members of La Esperanza.
Another category of serpents in this paradise, Irene now sees, are the foreigners who come to La Esperanza to exploit the small town’s economic and political vulnerability. The way Pablito’s father is left uncredited for his discovery of the archaeologically priceless underwater Mayan village is an example of how narratives constructed by outsiders frequently make the Indigenous populations to whom these treasures belong invisible. Some Indigenous members of the community find ways to exploit the foreigners as well—for example, the searcher who falsely claims to have located Sandra’s birth mother as part of an apparent extortion scheme. Andres, too, has been making victims of tourists, using his practice to assault women. Raya, Clarinda, and Amalia make money by selling things to tourists, showing that some interdependence can be necessary.
The impact of outside influence is further complicated by the ways foreign residents can sometimes help, like the American couple that teaches the girls to play basketball. Amalia, a German expatriate, builds schools; Raya adopts a baby who needs care; Irene pays for Clarina to attend school, a resource her own parent can’t provide. In a way, these are the collaborative efforts of a community, much like the work of the women Irene hires to unload her truck full of storebought plants.
The foreigners marking up supplies to sell to residents whose town has been devastated by a natural disaster are clearly exploitative, as are those trying to persuade breastfeeding mothers to buy formula. These are not relationships but efforts to gain profit, most baldly depicted by Gus and Dora’s efforts to farm the baby-making herb. They clearly feel justified in their right to commercialize this local resource, just as they feel they’ve reclaimed land that should have been granted them by Leila. But these are foreign residents squabbling over who has the right to own and make money off land that once belonged to local families, and these profit-making moves physically and culturally impact the local residents in ways they have little to no control over.
