The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird is a sweet and sad story, ultimately uplifting. It wasn't necessarily quite what I was expecting but I enjoyed it so much and found it a really easy book to read.

Lydia and Freddie are those annoying people who found their soulmate at school and have been together ever since. They're perfect for each other and are now planning their wedding. Until, on the night of Lydia's birthday dinner, Freddie detours to pick up their mutual friend, Jonah Jones, and is killed in a car accident. Lydia is heartbroken so when she finds that there is a way to fall asleep and revisit her old life she finds herself doing so as often as she can.

And that's the bit that wasn't quite as I expected. I'm not sure how I thought she show more would revisit her other life really but once I'd got my head around it it worked really well. It's sort of a parallel universe where everything is very similar but not the same, but Lydia doesn't care as she gets to be with her beloved Freddie again.

I actually ended up enjoying the chapters in Lydia's 'real' world much more than the others, I suppose because I was able to see her slowly getting over her grief there whereas the 'other' world was holding her back. I really liked Lydia and I wanted her to be happy again. I cared about her and her recovery and I loved the ending which was just what I wanted it to be.

There are loads of other brilliant characters in this book. Freddie, when he does appear, is as loveable as expected, Jonah is perfectly portrayed, and then there's Lydia's family and her colleagues. Each plays an important part in her passage through her grief and her eventual emergence at the other side like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

I thought this was a gorgeous story of love and loss. I giggled at times and I felt moved at times and what more can you ask for really? It's delightful. show less

I LOVED this book. This was the second book I’d read by Josie Silver, and while I enjoyed “One Day in December” too, I wanted to paste glittery stars all over this one for the lovely, nuanced story of surviving grief and coming through on the other side.

Lydia is engaged to Freddie. Freddie dies (this isn’t a spoiler as it’s in the blurb) and Lydia is left unable to function, unable to sleep. She’s given experimental pills to help her sleep, and a side effect produces such strong hallucinations, it’s like she goes to sleep and enters another world where Freddie is still alive and she has a parallel life with him where he never died. Then she wakes and is forced to march through the real world where he’s gone.

Such an show more interesting premise—and of course you can guess where this might lead with regards to the pills. The beauty in this story is in its close, intimate telling of grief, the relationships Lydia has with her sister, her mother, and Jonah, the close friend of both her and Freddie. I absolutely adored this book.

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. show less

It didn’t take a lot for me to grab One Day in December off the bookshelves of my college campus’s Barnes and Noble last winter.
A Reese Witherspoon booklist sticker and a light purple cover with a London bus were all it took.
“Never judge a book by a cover” yadda yadda yadda… I’ve never been so grateful to have done exactly that.
Came for the Reese’s Pick, stayed for Josie Silver’s incredible story.
I read all of One Day in December in one day in December, oddly enough.
Books that read like movies are the ones that truly transport me. I spent half of my reading time imaging which actors would play each character. I give it another year or two before we see a movie adaptation of this book.
All this to say, my anticipation show more level was high when I heard that Silver’s latest book The Two Lives of Lydia Bird was coming out this month.
I Marched (not sorry) straight to my local bookstore and was shocked to find it there already! I was ready to get lost in the latest.
First, a brief, spoiler-free synopsis:
Engaged and together for more than a decade, Lydia and Freddie seem to be the couple who will go the distance. But on Lydia’s twenty-eighth birthday, Freddie dies.
Somehow, Lydia is going to have to figure out how to go on without him. Or is she?
Following a too-long string of no sleep and an inability to climb into the bed she and Freddie once shared, Lydia is prescribed new, trial sleeping pills. These pills wind up doing more than helping her sleep — they transport her to a place where Freddie is still alive.
It doesn’t take Lydia long to realize that this dream-like other world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — the supporting cast of characters are there too, and not everything goes according to plan in Lydia’s “alternate universe.”
With her mom, her sister Ellie, Freddie’s best friend Jonah, her coworkers and more hoping Lydia stays in reality, will she ever be ready to let the love of her life go? Can anyone have more than one happy ending?

Review
After the immediate connection I had felt with Laurie from One Day in December, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to connect so quickly with the characters in The Two Lives of Lydia Bird.
For the first 75 pages or so, I found myself doing multiple check-ins: Is this resonating? Do I believe it? Can I empathize with this amount of insurmountable grief?
Then I got to a point in one of the “alternate reality” chapters, and noticed tears rolling down my cheek. It resonated — it really did.
I cried about two or three more times throughout this novel.
In real life, we experience love and loss all the time. It’s often not to the level of Lydia’s, but it’s omnipresent in our lives. Maybe that’s why it is the rest of the story that stuck with me more strongly than these parts.
Lydia isn’t just a heartsick millennial hoping to never let go.
She’s also single for the first time in more than a decade, evaluating what her life should look like. Is she brave enough to cut her hair, the long mane Freddie so dearly loved? Can she redecorate their apartment the way she wanted? Is she capable of traveling solo?
In many ways, she realizes she is forever changed by what happened. In others, she actively makes changes and takes authority that she should have a long time ago. She’s a new person, someone she hopes she would have discovered even if Freddie was still there. Would he love the new her anyway? And does that matter?
In this stellar book, these questions relate to a romantic relationship, but in real life, they don’t have to. I loved the importance of each side character in helping Lydia find her way, especially the undying support of the women in her life. They weren’t nonchalant cheerleaders of every decision Lydia made; rather, they made her question her instincts and often pushed back. It made her better.
It also mattered to me that everyone else wasn’t sunshine and rainbows — each character experienced their own pain and grief in a variety of ways, related to Freddie and not. There were multiple storylines with fully formed characters, something we don’t often get in “chicklit.”
Just like One Day in December, I can see this turning into a feature-length film. If so, I hope the depths of those characters remain.
My one qualm with this book is the suspension of reality necessary to believe in the “alternate universe” storyline. My least favorites chapters were consistently the times Lydia was “asleep,” visiting Freddie and her cast of characters on the other side.
I’m not sure what else the author could have chosen to do here — traveling between two worlds was going to require some level of reality suspension. Still, I am grateful Silver took the time to carefully craft that world, ensuring that readers couldn’t argue Lydia was “delusional” or “hallucinating.” I never once thought that, and it might have been easy to think if done wrong.
Here is one of my favorite quotes from the novel:
“I found the old me, still in here, and the new me sitting right alongside her. We made friends.”
Overall, I was enamored by Silver’s second book and I’m already looking forward to her next.
One Day in December, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird… What are the odds it has “Three” in the title?
4 out of 5 stars show less

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird was a highly anticipated book for me as I very much delighted in Josie Silver's 2018 novel One Day in December. Not only did I end up enjoying The Two Lives of Lydia Bird but I ended up connecting with it even more than my first book by Silver.

I can appreciate a good contemporary romance but I definitely am drawn to plotlines that are a bit more realistic and relatable so this was a great fit for me. Silver shines at sharing stories that are heartwarming while also feeling like they are rooted in reality.

This book was heavy at times and I appreciated the look at the process of grief, especially for a young woman who was still finding herself when she lost the love of her life. The plotline isn't seamless and show more I got a lot out of seeing the main character Lydia move through the different stages of loss.

While there was a romantic storyline, I appreciated that this new guy didn't just sweep Lydia off her feet and make her forget about her grief. The overwhelming and persistent feelings of loss felt real and the tumultuous road to her healing made this book feel heartbreaking and powerful at the same time. If you are looking for an engaging and emotional read, I definitely recommend this one.

Thank you to Ballantine Books for the gifted advanced copy and galley. show less

I'll start of by saying maybe this book would have landed better with me if I had experienced some deep grief in my life, but as I've never lost someone who was so large an aspect of my life I couldn't rely on my own experiences to help send home the emotional weight of what Lydia Bird was dealing with. Silver didn't write the story in a way that felt like it allowed me to really connect with what Lydia is experiencing despite my lack of personal experience with grief, and honestly at some points I just found Lydia to be exasperating. Despite being informed by the narrative that Lydia never holds Jonah Jones responsible for Freddie's death (sure she wishes Freddie hadn't detoured, but she doesn't think it's Jonah's fault), we see her show more lashing out at him multiple times, and accuse him of being unable to understand what she's going through, when objectively Jonah would probably be the person with the closest understanding of what exactly she's lost, as the other point of their trio. The fact the literal day after helping her sister deliver her baby, prematurely, she's taking the next available flight out of England, and doesn't seem capable of understanding why her family might be upset by that is infuriating. The narrative justifies it by saying this sabbatical is exactly what Lydia needed to get her head on straight, but even that doesn't feel well done. She comes to her senses because her honeymoon with Freddie turned out to be an unmitigated disaster and she didn't want to risk visiting her second life again and "messing it up" for the other her. In the second half of the book, Lydia's musings to herself began to feel more like preaching to the reader about how to healthily move through grief rather than a realistic idea of what someone might be thinking.
My other major gripe is the romance aspect. This book is not a romance book? Lydia basically just falls into a relationship with Jonah at the end, who surprise surprise, actually loved her since they were kids (my literal least favorite trope). We don't really get to see their relationship develop, the reader is just informed that they talk often and it's become the highlight of Lydia's week. It does a disservice to Dee, who Jonah had been dating for a while, as seemingly their relationship is crushed under the weight of Jonah's grief and maybe his own feelings for Lydia? Honestly, the romance wasn't written well enough for me to root for it, and just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. show less

Lydia's grief at losing Freddie was palpable. I almost didn't think I would keep reading, it packed such an emotionally draining punch. The experimental sleeping pills her mother and sister promote send her back to her life with Freddie when she sleeps. Lydia begins to crave them like an addict and sleeps time away trying to escape the loss in her real life and see how a parallel life would play out. It all seems so real. But in the present, time marches on and Lydia's job, friends and family need her too. I am glad I stuck with it to the more hopeful end.

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

I Picked Up This Book Because: I’ve liked the author’s previous work.

The Characters:

Lydia Bird:
Jonah Jones:
Freddie, Lydia’s sister, Lydia’s brother in law, Lydia’s mother

The Story:

I’m not sure I’d agree with the blurb and say this book is thrilling and I barely think it’s romance. It was unfortunately just an okay read for me. I shouldn’t say unfortunately because okay is not bad it just wasn’t amazing. Lydia’s grief is palpable and her desire to visit a world where her fiance, Freddie, still exist is understandable. The realization that reality has changed her is one of the most important points in the story and letting go of that world while difficult was also necessary. I feel show more like her romance with Jonah was barely a thing, especially since she spent most of the book not wanting to talk to him.

The Random Thoughts:

#LibraryLoveChallenge

3 Stars show less