The Two Lives of Lydia Bird: A Novel

by Josie Silver

Two lives. Two loves. One impossible choice. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club Pick One Day in December . . .
 
“I read The Two Lives of Lydia Bird in a single sitting. What a beautiful, emotional gift Josie Silver has given us.”—Jodi Picoult

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.

• ISBN10: 0593158431
• ISBN13: 9780593158432
• Publish Date: 3 March 2020 (first published 30 January 2020)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Ballantine Books
• Edition: International edition
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 384
• Language: English

Reviews

[Marissa Lupe Author]

"The Two Lives of Lydia Bird" by @josiesilverauthor was such a beautiful read about loss, grief, family, friendship, finding yourself and your own inner strength. When Lydia gets the gift of continuing a life of what could have been if her fiance had not passed away, while also continuing her real life where he no longer is alive. Beautiful and real in all the right places, I highly enjoyed this one.

[jen20]

3.5⭐️

[girlinthepages]

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird was my first novel by Josie Silver, and I was incredibly excited going into the novel. I had heard great things about One Day in December, the cover is gorgeous, and I'm a huge fan of parallel universe stories. Yet this book put me in a major reading slump for the month of February and into early March and was really not what I was expecting. I anticipated some grief, as the premise starts out with Lydia's fiancé dying, and some magical realism what with Lydia being able to "visit" Freddie in an alternate version of her life where he had survived. However the pacing of the story just really dragged for me. While it was interesting to see how Lydia's two lives were running parallel to each other (and how the life that seemed "ideal" wasn't always actually the better option for her), as a reader I felt lost in the mundane details of Lydia's life sometimes and wanted more explanation as to HOW these parallel universes were existing (which I never really felt that I got a satisfactory explanation for). I also wasn't a fan of ANY of the romantic plot lines, though I did enjoy Lydia's relationship with her sister and how that played out in both universes (and was actually more important than the things that happened to Lydia, honestly). I kept reading until the end because I was really hoping for some big, exciting twist that would explain how Lydia was experiencing both timelines but the explanation (if you can even call it that) really fell flat for me.

Overall: Interesting concept but the execution didn't work for me.

Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads This review was originally posted on Girl in the Pages

[Sam@WLABB]

This book wrecked me! I cried so much. Silver did an incredible job making me feel the depth of Lydia's grief and pain. My heart ached. Lydia's healing process was interesting, and the combination of the awake and asleep worlds worked so well to help me understand Lydia's journey.

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[merryfaith]

Sweet, albeit predictable, quarantine read that I picked up as I read something that had a happy ending after a couple memoirs that wrecked me. Should be noted that grief plays a prominent role in the first part of the book, but it does have a happy ending. The audiobook dragged on for me and I just wanted it to be done by the end for some reason.