The protagonist narrator of Abbigail Rosewood’s If I had two Lives hides behind other people’s emotions like a child hiding behind her mother’s skirt. But this child, growing up in a Vietnamese military camp, gets little support from her mother and latches onto another lonely girl for guidance and companionship instead.

The first part of the novel gives an evocative portrayal of postwar Vietnamese life and trials through the eyes of a child. In a world of men, two girls are vulnerable. And in a world of separation, attachment is both danger and treasure.

The protagonist loses focus, mirrored by shifts in the story, as the second part of the novel begins in a not-overly welcoming America. But she finds another lonely girl – lonely adult now – and begins to fill her life again with stories. Except that adult stories have a habit of becoming real.

Returning, child as mother now, to Vietnam, the story shifts and changes again. Coming full circle, it leaves the reader wondering how far fiction and imagination define a life, and how far children redefine it? Do we have two lives, before and after childbirth? And how much of who we are is determined by circumstance; how much do we choose?

By the end of the novel, the protagonist does indeed have two lives, and the reader is left to ponder, which do we love more—real life or the life we make up for ourselves?

Disclosure: I was given a copy and I freely offer my honest review. ( )

I did like this book. Although, I found that I struggled with finding the strong emotional connection that this type of book requires.

Our young woman is a good narrator. She does bring me the reader into her world. I instantly got a good visual into what life was like for her. Therefore, I understood her "obsession" with the solider and young girl. Which in turn transpired into her new life in America.

What I struggled with is that the other characters were "faceless". In what I mean by this is that because I did not share a strong connection to the other characters, they could have been anyone. They were characters in this story but it was mainly the young woman's voice that was the star of this book for me. ( )