8 Books to Prepare Your Family for Guatemala
Planning a trip to Guatemala with kids? Reading about a place before you visit can make the experience so much richer. Here are a handful of picture books, chapter books, and even grown-up books that we enjoyed before visiting Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán in March 2025.
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Abuela’s Weave by Omar Castañeda
A village girl and her grandmother sell their woven crafts at the market in Guatemala City. A lovely picture book for younger readers.
Woven tapestries are a huge part of indigenous Guatemalan culture, passed on from generation to generation and a source of pride. Read this book and the following one, and then take your kids to a weaving co-op on your trip.
There were at least one or two in each of the major villages surrounding Lake Atitlán. They offer free demonstrations of the process, including exhibits of the local plants that are used to make the brilliant dye colors. If your kids are older and like working with their hands, they may enjoy taking a weaving class. Or it can be a fun solo activity for Mom or Dad. I found a local woman who taught me to weave in her home in Santa Clara La Laguna. Leave a comment if you’d like to get her contact information.
Rainbow Weaver/Tejedora del Arcoíris by Linda Elovitz Marshall
This English-Spanish picture book is extra helpful for families who want to practice their Spanish before using it in Guatemala. In the story, a Mayan girl near Lake Atitlán wants to weave but her mother can’t spare extra materials. She resourcefully gathers plastic bags and makes tapestries out of these instead.
La Tienda de Mamá y Papá by Amelia Lau Carling
Also available in English from the bookseller linked above. I love this picture book because it features a Chinese immigrant family who run a general store in Guatemala City. The girl in the story buys candy from a street vendor. Her parents serve tea at the shop to a friend. Mayan customers come in the shop to buy thread. The book shows the delightful ways people from different backgrounds manage to communicate, appreciate one another´s differences, and build a society together.
Sleeping with the Lights On by David Unger
This short chapter book tells the true story of the author’s childhood growing up in Guatemala during the beginning of the multi-decade civil war starting in the 1960s. His parents were European immigrants to the country. The family was eventually able to flee to the United States when things got bad. There are funny parts, but it is also a story of losing one’s home and learning to make a home in the new place.
The Most Beautiful Place in the World by Ann Cameron
Seven-year-old Juan lives with his grandmother after being abandoned by his mother who goes to live with her new husband. He shines shoes on the street, but wants to go to school. Set in a village on Lake Atitlán, the chapter book tenderly communicates the challenges of poverty, family belonging, a child’s ambitions, and love of place.
The Girl from Chimel by Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Mayan activist. In this chapter book she shares her childhood memories from before Guatemala’s devastating civil war, including folk stories, family lore, and lots of wisdom from the land and its inhabitants.
The Bird Hotel by Joyce Maynard
A novel for grown-ups, Maynard describes with care and compassion the locals and expats who make their life together around Atitlán, told through the story of an artist from the United States who ends up running a boutique hotel by the lake.
At the end of the book Maynard describes some of the challenges of getting this story published, due to publisher concerns about who has the right to tell the story. Maynard herself lives along the shores of Lake Atitlán for part of the year as an expat. On our own visit, we experienced some of the extreme power and wealth inequities between the expat-tourist crowd and the locals. We think she did a decent job of communicating the tensions.
In a strange, magical twist, we ran into the author herself at a weaving co-op on our first full day visiting Lake Atitlán!
Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer
For grown-ups who want to get into meatier issues, this nonfiction book describes why so many Central Americans have left their countries to find a better life in the United States.
