The Bird Hotel is a literary novel by Joyce Maynard, an American journalist and New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen novels and works of nonfiction. Her books include literary fiction, true crime, memoirs, and novels for young adults, including The Usual Rules (2004). She frequently probes personal conflicts around love, secrets, parenthood, and reconciliation. Her novel Count the Ways, published in 2021, won the French Grand Prize in American Literature.

After a traffic accident takes the lives of her husband and son, Irene, who has spent her life in disguise as the orphaned daughter of a suspected terrorist, finds refuge in a small hotel called La Llorona in a fictionalized Central American town located beside a beautiful lake in the shadow of a volcano. When she unexpectedly becomes the owner of La Llorona, Irene struggles to restore the hotel and eventually makes the place her home, integrating into the community through the friends she makes. Blending family saga and elements of magical realism, The Bird Hotel explores themes like The Endurance of Grief and Love, The Search for Family, and The Gradual Process of Healing.

This guide relies on the hardcover first edition published by Arcade Books in 2023.

Content Warning: The content includes the loss of a young child, suicidal ideation, sexual assault, and depictions of untreated alcohol addiction. The narrator uses the term “gringo” to refer to foreign visitors and white, foreign-born residents of their Latin American town.

Plot Summary

A prologue describes how the first-person narrator, 27 and grieving the unexpected loss of her husband and son, planned to take her own life by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco but instead ended up at the Bird Hotel. The early chapters flash back to the childhood of young Joan, growing up poor and itinerant with her mother, Diana, known for her string of boyfriends and beautiful singing voice. When Joan was nearly seven, her mother was reportedly killed in an accidental explosion caused by the radical activist group known as Weather Underground. Fearing that they might be implicated in the group’s illegal activities, Joan’s grandmother changes Joan’s name to Irene and moves them several times around the country.

Irene grows up keeping her past a secret, even from her husband, Lenny, a sweet-tempered man she meets and marries after graduating from high school. When Lenny and their young son, Arlo, are killed in a car accident in San Francisco, Irene, dazed with grief, boards a bus headed to Central America and ends up at a tiny hotel called La Llorona, located near the town of La Esperanza on Lago La Paz, or Peace Lake.

Irene meets and is cared for by Leila, the American woman who owns La Llorona and has turned her hotel and property into a beautiful garden, though one in need of repair. Leila takes Irene into her confidence, and Irene feels she is slowly coming back to life, though she retains the lifelong habit of being secretive about her past. She becomes acquainted with the village, a rural place with a long Mayan history and a subculture of foreigners who have made the place their home. When Leila unexpectedly dies, Irene learns that Leila has left the hotel and its grounds to her, on the condition that she retain Leila’s staff.

Irene is grateful for the help of Gus, a British expat and handyman, who offers to undertake the many repair projects needed to get La Llorona back into shape. Irene asks Gus’s wife, Dora, for help signing the Spanish legal documents pertaining to her ownership. Irene plans to prepare the hotel for sale, but in the meantime, she finds herself becoming part of the community of La Esperanza. There are Maria and Luis, the couple who have worked for Leila for years, along with their young son, Elmer, who is in love with La Llorona’s other employee, the beautiful young Mirabel. She meets Amalia, who grew up in communist East Germany and has enlisted the village children in turning trash into building materials. She meets Wade and Rosella, who run competing restaurants, and Walter, a local boy who appoints himself Irene’s guide. Then there are the lizard men, three retired Americans who sit all day at the café and leer at the young girls passing by.

As repairs on the hotel continue, guests come and go, and Irene gets small insights into their lives. One woman, a Chinese doctor, Jun Lan, searches for and locates an herb that helps an infertile woman conceive. An American couple is devasted when the wife is sexually assaulted by the local Mayan astrologer, Andres, whom Leila told Irene not to trust. After the incident, Andres goes missing. An ornithologist proposes marriage to Irene, but she isn’t in love with him. Adoptive parents bring their daughter to meet the woman they are told is her birth mother, and Irene feels the girl’s eagerness and disappointment at the reunion, reminded of her own loss.

Irene becomes part of life in La Esperanza, arranging with Amalia to send a bright local girl, Clarinda, to school. When a newcomer to town, an American woman, adopts one of Rosella’s twins after Rosella dies in childbirth, Irene reflects on the variety of family arrangements that can still provide love. She doesn’t look for love herself, but just when Irene is ready to sell La Llorona, a sudden storm damages the property. As she rebuilds, Irene realizes that La Llorona feels like home; she is no longer just a traveler passing through.

Then Irene learns that, in the Spanish documents she signed, Dora tricked her into giving La Llorona to Dora and Gus. They take over half the property, build a concrete wall, and begin farming the baby-making herb that Jun Lan discovered. Irene is deeply hurt by this betrayal, but she is determined to stay at the hotel. When she learns that Mirabel was raped by the Lizard Men, Irene takes Mirabel to the police, winning a small measure of justice when the Lizard Men are arrested.

Irene finds herself attracted to a visiting American, the handsome Tom Martinez. Then she meets an even more surprising visitor: Her mother turns up in La Esperanza. Diana didn’t die in the explosion nearly thirty years earlier; instead, she became a fugitive. When Irene learns that Tom is a New York City police officer, she fears he’s come for Diana. Feeling betrayed, she sends Tom away, even though he’s fallen in love with her, and she with him.

The next morning, the volcano erupts, destroying much of La Esperanza, but La Llorona is saved by the concrete wall that Gus and Dora built. In the devastation, Elmer runs to rescue Mirabel, who gave birth that morning. Though Irene has feared the water for much of her life, she jumps into the lake to retrieve the boat where Mirabel placed her newborn infant. Once more, with her found family about her, Irene sets to rebuilding La Llorona, but for years she doesn’t open the letters Tom sends her.

Then one day, she finally opens one of his letters, and Tom explains. He was the son of an off-duty police officer killed in the Weather Underground explosion, and he became obsessed with tracking down Diana, whom he blamed for his father’s death. He describes how, after he returned to New York, Diana got in touch with him, and he forgave her before her death. He promises Irene that he will always love her. Touched by his letter and the sudden reappearance of Leila’s daughter, Charlotte, Irene flies to New York to reconcile with Tom.