The Bird Hotel

“Meaning, he was the last person I’d ever picture myself falling in love with, the last person who’d ever fall in love with me. Only we did.”

The narrator’s voice is often conversational, sometimes dry, and direct in its language. The theme of love and how it persists even after or through loss is introduced early when Irene describes falling in love with her husband, Lenny, her opposite and foil in so many ways.

“I can still see my husband lying there. His face bore an expression I had seen once before, in a photograph: a citizen of Pompeii, frozen in time and petrified in his moment of greatest horror—mouth open, eyes wide, as the dust of Vesuvius rained down on them, as if it were the end of the world.”

This image the narrator uses to describe Lenny’s face compares his death to an epic natural disaster like the eruption of Vesuvius, burying the ancient city of Pompeii. For the narrator, the loss of her husband and son is an end to the world she knows, while the reference to an erupting volcano foreshadows later events.

“I let myself be carried along with no greater sense of volition than a stick floating down a stream or a piece of milkweed drifting in the wind.”

This figurative language captures the aimless wanderings that lead the narrator from the US to Lago La Paz, but this image also implies a deeper, natural logic directing the flow of events. A lack of direction characterizes Irene’s life more largely, as she follows her grandmother throughout her childhood and then, once she ends up at the La Llorona, allows herself to be guided by the advice or actions of others.

“How can I describe La Llorona, as it looked to me that day—a vision of paradise before me at the darkest time I could ever have imagined?”

While the narrative sometimes plays with time, stepping outside strict chronology, this is an obvious moment where the narrator pauses the action to give a full description of the hotel. This allows Maynard to build the contrast between the grief Irene is fleeing and the beauty that awaits her.

“We get a lot of seekers here. People on the run from their old lives. People in search of answers, without necessarily considering the questions.”

Leila’s statement reflects Irene’s situation—she, too, is a seeker who has ended up in La Esperanza—but this also characterizes La Esperanza more generally: it’s described as a place people come to live when they want to leave an old life behind. The town’s name serves as a symbol, and the theme of rebuilding one’s life after loss becomes a major part of the novel.

“The new expatriate settlers had seemed to float in like a puff of smoke, with as little awareness of this place or the people who’d made it their home for centuries as a swarm of locusts.”

Maynard wrestles with the issue of cultural appropriation and what happens to Indigenous communities when foreigners settle there and tourist economies are created. Irene takes the point of view of the natives in thinking of the white foreigners as gringos, a term that can be interpreted as lightly derogatory as it not only suggests racial otherness but also implies a certain ignorance or lack of respect for the traditions and customs of the place.

“Wherever I looked there was something magical. And something broken. It was the broken part that allowed me to feel at home in this place.”

La Llorona is a paradox: It has unparalleled natural beauty, but it lacks economic opportunity. This image explains how Irene feels comfortable there precisely because so much of the property is in need of repair, like her.

“If part of being alive is caring about other people and what happens to them, I was coming back to life.”

An important theme of the novel is recovery and resilience, renewal after loss and devastation. Irene finds that, more than the natural beauty of La Esperanza, she comes back to life through caring for the new people she has met and taken an interest in, speaking to the novel’s larger message about the importance of love and human connection.

“A song from long ago came to mind, ‘Long Black Veil.’ For a moment, I could hear my mother’s voice. Then Gus’s again.”

When Irene first dines at Gus and Dora’s home and hears Gus explain why he left England, she thinks of her mother singing an old English ballad that always scared young Joan, especially the line about a veiled woman weeping over a man’s bones. The flashback foreshadows of the betrayal Irene will later experience from Gus—just as she feels betrayed by her mother’s abandonment—but the speaker in the song “Long Black Veil” also evokes La Llorona, the wailing woman.

“Wherever I went, whatever I did, I carried with me the old story inside me, of what happened before. I could stand at the edge of that impossibly blue lake take in the beauty all around me—the birds, and the flowers, and the taste on my lips of the most perfect mango, its juice dripping down my chin—but I still felt like a traveler passing through.”

This uses multisensory, descriptive language to evoke the beauty of the novel’s setting but uses the contrast to highlight Irene’s deeply ingrained sense of not belonging. Accustomed since childhood to being on the run, Irene takes a long time to feel at home at La Llorona, and this shapes her character arc throughout the book. It takes surviving several disasters and trials for Irene to realize that she, like the jocote tree, has put down roots that can anchor her.

“So long as I was studying an image from nature and trying to capture it on the page, I could forget my grief. I was never happier than when I was painting.”

Irene’s love of art is a key element of her character, and this sensibility is part of what allows her to appreciate La Llorona so deeply. Her experience suggests the healing power of nature as well as art, enlarging the novel’s themes of resilience and recovery.

“A central fact of my life over all this time: that there was no space in my life, or interest, in a relationship. Now, for the first time in years, I allowed myself to imagine the possibility.”

Characteristic of the spare, forthright prose, this passage also captures a turning point in Irene’s character arc. Finding love again, a suggestion she dismisses in her early years at La Llorona, becomes a possibility when Jerome appears and moves Irene to consider whether she could be interested in a relationship or children. This interaction leads Irene to confirm her own need for love, and meeting Jerome foreshadows her falling in love with Tom.

“I knew some things myself about what it meant to be a person who never fully knew where she came from.”

Though much of the action of the novel addresses the ways Irene builds a community and a home at La Llorona, there is a haunting refrain around the loss of her mother and the feeling that she still needs to hide her birth identity. This suspense is repaid at the end when Irene meets Diana, but it also proves part of her character arc that she comes to see herself as identifying with her new home.

“Every paradise has its serpents.”

This saying becomes something of a motif throughout the novel. Leila gives Irene this warning early on, and it proves to be true. While comparing La Esperanza and the region to the biblical Garden of Eden, this truism also suggests that sorrow and loss are inevitable in human life.

“The birds seemed only to sing louder, after the storm.”

The storm that devastates La Llorona is a sudden conflict that alters Irene’s plans once again, making her reconsider her path. This episode is one of the disasters, natural and human-made, from which Irene must recover, speaking to the novel’s themes of resilience and regrowth, but the birdsong, as enduring as the presence of the volcano, signifies that renewal is possible.

“As the weeks passed, spent laying tile and hammering boards, repainting plaster, replanting garden beds—first weeks, then months—it came to me that I wasn’t going anywhere else after all. I was already home.”

The time she spends rebuilding La Llorona after the storm mirrors the time Irene spent healing at La Llorona after she lost her husband and son. The care she takes in restoring Leila’s gardens shows the attachment Irene feels to preserving Leila’s legacy, but this is also the moment in her character arc when Irene realizes she has found a new home.

“So there it was. My best and only hope lay in slicing off half of the land Leila had planted and cared for all those years. I thought about certain flowers and plants I’d particularly loved. My jade thunbergia. The pelican vine. The jocote tree.”

The language of amputation captures the shock and loss Irene feels when she learns that Dora has tricked her into signing over her land—a move that echoes Irene’s previous losses. The plants Leila grew and tended have facilitated her healing and taught her to carry on with her life, symbolizing her rebirth. This is another moment where Irene realizes that change is inevitable, loss can be sudden and unexpected, but the rest of the world carries on despite one’s bereavement, unchanged.

“You never know when it could all disappear. All you can do is be grateful for what you get for as long as you have it.”

This philosophy about making the best of a situation is expressed in several ways and through the viewpoints of several characters, though here, with a sweet irony, it is the character self-named Raya Sunshine who counsels fortitude and optimism. This is the way the residents of La Esperanza live their lives.

“In some ways, everything kept changing here; in others, it remained as unchanged as the outline of the volcano against the sky.”

Irene thinks of the town of La Esperanza in terms of paradoxes—the ugly and the beautiful side by side, the best and worst of human nature together. This contrast between what changes and what endures reflects on the other formative contrasts and parallels of the novel.

“In all my years of welcoming travelers to the hotel, I’d never said this much before, but something about this man inspired my trust. Maybe I was just getting tired of carrying around secrets.”

Irene doesn’t reveal her past to Lenny, her husband, but meeting Tom Martinez is a turning point. Her ability to trust him is a sign of her recovery; Irene is ready to fall in love again.

“Whatever the people who’d been born here thought about the phenomenon of blindfolded Americans stumbling around their village with walking sticks for the purpose of reaching higher consciousness, or chocolate ceremonies led by some redheaded Californian, and volcano tours directed by a man from New Hampshire, they appeared to take all of it with good-natured grace and a certain earnest curiosity.”

Maynard doesn’t attempt to speak for the Indigenous peoples and native residents who live in the area she is describing, but she does examine the impact of foreign visitors and foreign residents, mostly white Europeans and North Americans referred to collectively as “gringos.” This raises complex questions about the appropriation of native cultures, the impact of outside influences, and who has the right to speak for whom.

“It [drawing] was, for me, a kind of meditation, and especially when a wave of grief came over me about my husband and son—as happened, still.”

Irene’s solace in her painting is part of what contributes to her resilience in dealing with difficult emotions: old grief, the shock of losing her property, and the reappearance of her mother. Her art is an essential part of her character and speaks to the power of creativity in healing from enduring grief and deep trauma.

“I just wanted to be there at La Llorona with people I loved around me. If the world was ending, let it end there.”

Ironically, when El Fuego erupts—a disaster foreshadowed at various points previously—Irene doesn’t run. She spent her childhood running, and she fled again when Lenny and Arlo died, but when she thinks the world is ending, she finds solace in what has become her home and the people who have formed her community. Like the villagers of La Esperanza, she survives by putting down roots.