The Two Lives of Lydia Bird

"This book, again, is told in alternating chapters, but they’re both in the voice of the main character, Lydia Bird. Lydia Bird is living a wonderful life. She’s engaged to Freddie, a man she’s known since school days. On her birthday, he’s involved in a car accident and, tragically, dies. Poor Lydia is absolutely distraught. She has no means of pulling herself out of this awful grief and resorts to sleeping pills she’s been given by her mum. They’re meant to be a little bit unusual or experimental. That night, she enters into a dream where Freddie, her deceased fiancé, is alive. But it doesn’t feel like a dream; it feels like reality. The book is split into alternating chapters: “Asleep” and “Awake”. In the awake ones we’re in the present, the so-called real world where, sadly, Freddie has died. And, despite the efforts of her mum and her sister to bring her back to life, she’s very slow to recover. Josie Silver does it very cleverly. You’d imagine that the main character, Lydia, would want to spend her whole time back in the past, in her dreams, where none of this has happened. She’s experiencing a parallel world, it’s almost a Sliding Doors -esque situation. The awake world has no Freddie. The sleeping world has a Freddie, but not everything in the sleeping world is quite as perfect as it might seem. Silver has not made it a utopia, she has made it flawed in certain ways. And then, Lydia comes back and is awake. It’s the dichotomy between the awake world and the asleep world—and which one she’s going to settle to stay in. As relationships fracture in one, they grow stronger in another. There was a trio of friends. Freddie’s best friend, who was in the car with him, survived. There’s something going on there that has never really been allowed to flourish before because Lydia was in love with his best friend. That’s another element: a love triangle. It’s a cleverly thought-out book. Again, it’s very sad because the grief element is running through the whole book. To find yourself reunited with somebody that you’d lost in death is a very poignant situation to find yourself in. It was a great read. I liked The Two Lives of Lydia Bird very much."