Julie's Review: The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

Author: Josie Silver
Series: None
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 432
Obtained: publisher via Netgalley
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction
Rating: 4/5
Bottom Line: Loved Lydia but would have preferred a different ending

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Summary: 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.  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 Lydia’s twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie died in a car accident.  So now it’s just Lydia, and all she wants is to 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 through the doorway to 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. ~amazon.com

Review: One Day in December was one of my favorite novels of 2019 and I was looking forward to her sophomore novel and it didn't disappoint. For their teenage years and most of their adult life it's been Lydia and Freddie with their clan of friends and family. Unfortunately, Freddie and Lydia don't get their happily ever after because he dies in a car accident on her 28th birthday. Lydia doesn't know how to be without Freddie and it unsettles her. She realizes that her whole life has been wrapped through Freddie. For the better part of 56 days her sister, Elle and mom have been taking care of her. Making sure she eats and basically trying to get her to live again. She's not really sleeping but taking naps on the couch throughout the day. Until she gets a prescription for some sleeping pills and falls into a slumber but it's not a normal sleep; she's propelled into an alternate world where Freddie is still alive and they are still planning their wedding.

As Lydia starts to make her way back to the rest of the world, she's torn between moving on without Freddie and going to sleep so she can go back to being with Freddie. As Lydia begins to creep back into the world, she begins to live a little bit again. She starts going out with her sister and brother in law to the pub and talking to her friends again. Or specifically her and Freddie's 3rd wheel, Jonah. Except he wasn't always a 3rd wheel, before Freddie and Lydia dated, Jonah was her closest friend.

Lydia keeps 1 foot firmly planted in the real world and another planted in the her asleep world but it starts to take a toll on her life in the real world because she's not really getting the sleep she needs to heal and function. Also, she finds out that while her sleeping world is an alternative it's not exactly all peachy there either, especially when it comes to their honeymoon.

As her life starts to get back on track in the real world, Lydia has a choice to make between the living and the sleeping life. I loved how Lydia started to figure out who she was without Freddie and really who she wanted to be. She made changes on her own and some were made for her.

I really loved Lydia, her mom and her sister. I wasn't really sure about Freddie though for some reason. I thought maybe he was a bit too perfect but to be fair whenever someone does that we tend to remember the good and forget the things that drove us nuts.

I was hoping that Ms. Silver would go a different way with the ending but in the end she went where I thought earlier in the book. It didn't take away from the story but I just didn't want it to go the way she wrote it.

I can't wait to read what she writes next. This is a great novel to spend some hours with at  any point in your day.