The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver.

I was sent a free copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

I read Josie's debut novel "One Day in December" and loved it, it was memorising from the start and so when I saw this up for review on Netgalley I jumped at the chance.  It had a lot of live up to.

The story is based, obviously, around Lydia Bird, who at the start of the book looses her fiancé, Freddie in a car crash on her birthday. The story then follows Lydia as she goes through the path of grief and how she deals with it. Her life takes two routes, her everyday life grieving for Freddie and a life in which Freddie still exists. After battling sleep in the first few weeks after the accident she starts taking sleeping pills which take her to her other world, where the plans she and Freddie had are still played out and she goes between the two worlds in the rest of the book.
Lydia has strong relationships with her sister and her mother and all three characters are really well written, her sister is married and pregnant and her mother divorced and their relationship is strong but throughout the story line it's put to the test.  It also looks into Lydia's work relationships and the relationship with Jonah Jones, Lydia's best friend before Freddie and Freddie's best friend  as the three of them grew up.

The story is great and the fact that it switched from life to the other was interesting. There were a couple of points that really confused me, firstly her sister Elle is pregnant and expecting a baby, in one life Elle loses the baby and in the other she doesn't, I had to reread this whole part as I couldn't work out what had happened and whether she'd lost it or not or which life she was in - I had no clue! The other bit that really got to me was Lydia starts seeing Kris, a guy she meets at a work event, they have two dates if you can call them that, but then he's never mentioned again! He just vanishes.

The ending was lovely, Lydia goes away and finds that she needs her old life with Freddie less and less and I guess this is just part of the natural grieving process and the ending wasn't quite what I was expecting but it was nice and was a good and happy ending to the book.

Was it as good as "One Day in December", no. Was it a good book - yes, would I
recommend it - yes if you want something a little bit different.

I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads due to the confusing parts.