The Bird Hotel

“It was just after sunset when I reached the bridge—rising up through the mist, that wonderful shade of red I had loved, back when I still cared about the colors of things, and bridges, and getting to the other side of them.”

Maynard’s style is direct and lyrical. The observation about color characterizes the narrator, who is an artist, and the bridge becomes a metaphor for a crossing point in the narrator’s life. The novel begins with the emotional low point she experiences after losing her husband and son, the inciting incident for her journey to the Bird Hotel, where the main events of the novel unfold.

“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.