Review: The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird
Josie Silver
Expected publication date: March 3, 2020

In this next captivating love story from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of One Day in December, a young woman is reunited with her late fiancé in a parallel life. But is this happy ending the one she really wants?

Lydia and Freddie. Freddie and Lydia. They'd been together for more than a decade, and Lydia thought their love was indestructible.

But she was wrong. On her twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident.

So now it's just Lydia, and all she wants to do is hide indoors and sob until her eyes fall out. But Lydia knows that Freddie would want her to try to live fully, happily, even without him. So, enlisting the help of his best friend, Jonah, and her sister, Elle, she takes her first tentative steps into the world, open to life--and perhaps even love--again.

But then something inexplicable happens that gives her another chance at her old life with Freddie. A life where none of the tragic events of the past few months have happened.

Lydia is pulled again and again across the doorway of her past, living two lives, impossibly, at once. But there's an emotional toll to returning to a world where Freddie, alive, still owns her heart. Because there's someone in her new life, her real life, who wants her to stay.

Written with Josie Silver's trademark warmth and wit, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a powerful and thrilling love story about the what-ifs that arise at life's crossroads, and what happens when one woman is given a miraculous chance to answer them. - from Goodreads

I received this book for free from Goodreads Giveaways.

After completely loving Josie Silver's debut, One Day in December, I knew her next book would be a highly anticipated read for me.  While I didn't love it as much as her first, this book was still a solid read.

On Lydia's 28th birthday, her fiance Freddy is killed in a car accident.  She is adrift, unsure how to move forward with her life.  Then, after she begins taking sleeping pills, Lydia discovers that somehow, in her dreams, she's able to continue the life she and Freddy were meant to have together.  However, is that still what she really wants? 

First, I want to talk about Silver's writing - it's so readable and relatable, yet every word and phrase is imbued with so much emotion.  It's so easy to get lost in her stories and swept away in the writing.  I could have finished this book in a few hours, but I wanted to savor it.

You can't help but feel for Lydia when we first meet her.  She's just lost her fiance, she can barely leave the house they recently purchased together, and the wedding and honeymoon they were eagerly planning will never happen.  Her grief is so palpable.  When she realizes what the sleeping pills allow her to do, be with Freddy again, she's tempted to keep taking them, but she realizes pretty early on that this isn't the magic fix she initially thought it was.  She can't just sleep all day, ignoring her real life, but it was still interesting to see what days she chose to take the pills and how even the "dream world" wasn't quite how she imagined her life would be before the accident.

The secondary characters are pretty wonderful in this story.  Lydia's coworkers, sister, and mother are so understanding of her grief and just want to make her life easier.  Then there's also the character of Jonah, who survived the crash that Freddy didn't, and Lydia  has to come to terms with their complicated friendship.

After loving the first 2/3 of the book, I unfortunately thought the story kind of fell apart a little in the last section.  The pacing slowed way down and there were parts that didn't quite fit or seem necessary.  Overall, though, I enjoyed Lydia's journey through this simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming story.

4 stars