Book Review // The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

*Grateful to Random House for gifted copy

Rating: 3/5

Review: After reading the premise, I was hooked! Check it, Lydia’s boyfriend, Freddie dies in a car accident on her twenty-eighth birthday. Months after he dies, Lydia starts taking sleep medication that was prescribed to her, and she finds herself dreaming of a very vivid life where Freddie is very much alive. Lydia is now caught between real life without Freddie, and a dream life with Freddie.

Did it hook you too? I saw two things wrong with this book after finishing it earlier this week.

1. The pacing. For me, it took 200 pages to get into the story. While I found the grieving process difficult to read at times, it honestly lacked emotional depth. I kept reading with the hope that the pace would eventually pick up, and I guess it did towards the end, but not enough for me to rave about. 

1. Storyline didn’t develop. Everything was surface level. The sidebar stories were fine. Lydia’s character was full of problems. The ending was cliché and expected. 

I was really hoping for Lydia Bird to knock my socks off, because I’m a sucker for an adorable cover. But also because I’ve heard great things about Josie Silver’s first book, One Day in December. Mehhhhh. This one was a bummer, for sure.

Synopsis:

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)