I hardly have words for how incredibly inspired this book was. An ambitious novel, indeed!!
Lilith is a character I've always wanted to know more about, to read more about, to hear mentioned more in stories. I think this book does an amazing job of bringing her to life, and positioning her in such a way that reflects the soul of humanity as she lives through all the ages of mankind. Lilith's compassion, passion, fearlessness, and ferocity are on display in this thought-provoking and anger-inducing novel. I spent my entire reading experience simultaneously in awe of Lilith and infuriated at the portrayal of humanity - because it's not wrong! The subjugation and domination of women, the domino effects of so many seemingly insignificant yet pivotal moments are brought forth in this novel, and I can't applaud Nikki Marmery enough for her expert writing. I love the ending of this book, and can only hope that one day we won't need books such as these ones, even though they're beautiful.

In medieval Jewish text, Lilith is described as Adam’s first wife who asserted equality with her husband and disobeying god. This would be the start of her biblical portrayal as a demon, a child killer, a whore.

Nikki Marmery’s new novel, named after the “demon” Lilith herself, begins at the start of time and follows the misunderstood so-called she-demon until the modern day. Throughout the story, Lilith encounters many other misunderstood biblical female figures, including Eve, Jezebel, Noah’s wife Naamah, and Mary Magdalene. In her interactions with these women, the narrator Lilith retells the stories traditionally rooted in patriarchal values and gives nuance, depth, and breadth to those narratives. Marmery’s retelling of these religious texts emphasizes the deep-rooted misogyny of the Old and New Testaments, criticizing ways in which women have been blamed and subjugated since the earliest periods in history.

I enjoyed so much of this book, which challenged me to do additional research about some of the biblical stories and figures I hadn’t heard of before. While I did find certain passages a bit long (and maybe overly descriptive at times), Marmery’s prose are beautifully crafted and her dialogue is punchy and deliver many laugh out loud moments. On a personal note I tend to dislike when authors include mention of specific contemporary services (like TikTok, Instagram etc), but the mention of them here was so brief it didn’t completely take me out of the story.

Overall, I’d recommend Lilith for fans of feminist retellings of classics, historical fiction, or anyone fancying to question the values our world is built on thanks to religion (and the men that control it).

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

An interesting take on one of the most demonized (and also somehow forgotten) characters from Christian creation myths. Fans of other mythological retellings will find a lot of interest here.

I struggled to make it through this one.

When I think of Lilith, I see a strong, passionate, feminist. But I just didn’t get that from the simplistic writing structure. I wanted more.

I ended up dnfing this book at around 20%, I had a lot of high hopes for it as it sounded right up my alley as a mythological retelling of one of the most fascinating and underrated characters of Judaic/mesopotamian mythology, Lilith. But alas the book although starting strong weakened in both plot and prose as the book went on. Relying too much on modern buzzwordy feminism to ever be meaningful enough on its commentary, and not well crafted enough in its research and writing to appeal to a more general audience.

Overall I think it was a good premise that got diluted as the writer tried to be inclusive of many beliefs existing all at once within the story, thus not making the world building concrete enough. And by making it almost like a Lucifer ( the TV show) fanfic but instead of Lucifer being Lilith’s romantic interest it was Samael ? Anyway it kind of became a heist story losing all the existential nature it started with, than it was a hero's journey, and then the writing started to feel rushed and unmotivated. Overall it did not envelope me, and I believe I also had really high expectations which I believe caused me to be a bit more critical when starting out.

Lilith is a mythology retelling of the notorious female figure who was the first wife of Adam in the Bible. Except, in this version Lilith is portrayed differently as a symbolic loss of feminine power and the ultimate birth of the patriarchy.

The book considers the female counterpart to God, Asherah, who was believed in ancient times to be the wife of God. Asherah’s character and downfall depicts the loss of “Wisdom”, which ties into the missing divine feminine energy from the Bible stories. The story disputes the classic biblical teachings that Lilith and Eve are villains coupled with the dispute that woman are at a lower status to man vs being equal to man.

After reading text of the Dead Sea Scrolls / Essence Gospel of Peace, I became aware of the love and devotion that Jesus had for the “Divine Mother”, and it made me wonder why that part was missing from the Bible stories / teachings.

The religious teachings I grew up with, in relation to these female characters, were all about “sin” and the blame of woman for the downfall of God’s creation. But what of the Divine Mother of creation? IMO, the loss of the divine feminine has created a long history of turmoil and disrespect for our environment.

Given that, I can respect the premise of Lilith, the novel. It serves as an alternative story in a time where we need that missing / growing divine feminine energy to balance things out and take us to the next level of ascension.

But ultimately this book took me a couple of weeks to get through, which is longer than most I read. I didn’t fully flow with the story / writing nor connect with the characters, and honestly found myself dozing off on more than one occasion.

In the end, I appreciated the premise, but not as much the delivery of this one. My favorite part was actually the author’s notes at the end, making me wonder if I would have enjoyed this more as nonfiction?

Many thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. Lilith drops 10/17/23.

I love this genre of feminist retellings explaining a more detailed back story for historical figures everyone thinks they know, but really it's just one side of the story.

I just wish this story felt more interactive for the reader. We're getting a third person, birds eye view of Lilith's story but I felt disconnected from her. I'd have rather been shown and not told this story and there was a lot of explanations throughout instead of actually experiencing the journey with the character

Cue gothic organ music.... No but in all seriousness I loved this story. I thought that it was a brilliant retelling the swept you away in this world that felt very similar to the struggles of an average female but yet with fantastical elements also. I definitely think that this is a book that you read for the first time and you are like, but the more you read it the more you discover the hidden gems within the pages. I overall throughly enjoyed this story and think Nikki Marmery wrote something that many people, especially lovers of retellings will absolutely love.

This really had a strong start! I was roped in by Lilith immediately when she questioned Adam's opinions and what Yahweh was telling both of them to be correct. After she left the garden of Eden, the story lost me. I am familiar with bible stories, but I did not connect with Lilith's character at all. Her character development lacked depth and I didn't really feel any urgency behind her motives throughout the book.

Conflicted opinion on this one. On one hand I appreciated the feminist narrative, but it did feel a touch too modern. I didn’t find myself particular attached to the character.

Some of this book was very poetic, and the opening was incredibly strong, but unfortunately it didn't pull me in and I felt like a lot of it dragged. DNF at about halfway through.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to stumble across a book that changes our lives forever. Lilith is one of those stories and I am so glad that I found it, that she found me. I have been a practicing Witch for quite some time, but as I was raised within the Methodist church, I was always yearning for "our version" of the bible. Well, I think I finally found it. This is the ultimate, most beautiful re-telling of Lilith, Creation, Eden... I could go on. I felt as if I was reclaiming being a woman the entirety of reading this novel. All of the details aligned so perfectly - especially reading the amazing notes at the end. I now want to re-read it after reading those! This story is a battle cry to all women and I insist, INSIST you read it. Reclaim what we were refused so long ago! The author takes on a divine-like personality towards the end of the novel; almost as if they are Lilith, passing along the stories of the Great Mother and all of those who came after her. This novel gives women the origin story they deserve, the one they were cheated of. I can't begin to explain the peace that this novel put my soul to; wow. Wow, wow! I have so many words yet I am also incredibly speechless. This will be a novel I have a physical copy of (if not multiple) that is lined with highlighted passages and notated post-its. I think you'll find yourself feeling the same way once you sink your teeth into this story and find divine truth. How I'm going to wait until October for a physical copy, I don't know (LOL!), but I cannot wait to have this as a prized posession on my bookshelf. Thank you so, so much to Nikki Marmery for your time and dedication; I'm sure blood, sweat, and tears also went into this. I appreciate each and every one of them! To have this amount of information in one place is reminicent of Maryam's texts that she was so worried about preserving and passing on; it will make you feel so incredibly powerful, and for that I must thank the author again. Thank you to Alcove Press for providing me the opportunity to read an eARC of this title, as well as a giant thank you to NetGalley for the same. This title has changed my life - THANK YOU!

HIGHLIGHTS
~scary angels are dickhead jocks
~God is a brat
~the hero women have waited 6000 years for is an idiot

Where the hell do I start.

I can see what Marmery tried to do here, and why some other readers are going to feel so EmpoweredTM by this book, but honestly? It’s a trainwreck. The internal logic is whatever Marmery wants it to be at any given moment, rather than something that actually, you know, makes sense and holds the story together. Lilith breaks its own rules constantly, culminating in the absolutely ridiculous ending, which only works if you let none of your braincells anywhere near it. And the entire book is one loud, preachy lecture on the kind of bioessentialist Woman PowerTM nonsense I thought we were done with in the 80s.

Lilith is the First Woman, created at the same time as Adam in the garden of Eden. All is well until Adam starts becoming obsessed with power and control, inventing money and weaponry and The Patriarchy, basically. Just in case we didn’t get the message that he’s a terrible person, he also rapes her – but it’s fine, because Lilith shrugs it off like it was nothing, insulted but otherwise unaffected. The reader belatedly discovers that Yahweh is not the One God at all, because He has a wife and partner, Asherah; it is Asherah who created Adam and Lilith (and presumably everything else in Eden), because, and I quote,

<Naming is to man what birthing is to woman.>

Yahweh only named things, you see, which is meaningless, because

<naming holds no power.>

Asherah has bestowed upon Lilith the Secret, which makes Lilith capital-w Wise. This Wisdom is more or less summed up as ‘man and woman are equal, and have no dominion over the earth, because they are a part of it.’ But Asherah is missing, and the book really gets moving when Lilith abandons Eden to go look for Her. Although she doesn’t find Asherah, she does discover that she and Adam are far from the only humans in the world; later, she discovers that Yahweh and Asherah are far from the only gods to exist, too.

(This is important.)

Yahweh, here, is characterised as the ultimate Old White Cis Dude, insisting that He is the only one with power, the only god, that everything male is good and everything female is, at best, disgusting. He is petulant, spoiled, and bullying, a figure who would be pathetic if He didn’t have the power to enforce His horrible views on the world. He is a petty child next to the infinite wisdom and grace of Asherah.

I find this incredibly lazy writing. There is absolutely no nuance here, and what’s weirder and worse is that this is very clearly an ex-Christian take on God. I sympathise, because yeah, this is pretty much the impression of God I was left with too after I got far the fuck away from my Catholic upbringing – but Lilith isn’t a Christian figure. Lilith comes from Jewish folklore, and I’m not at all saying there is no dodgy patriarchal bs in Judaism – but there is an enormous difference between the Christian and Jewish views and approaches to God. I feel like the least you could do, in telling Lilith’s story, is respecting the culture and faith she comes from.

If that doesn’t bother you, nevermind, there are plenty more things this book does badly. The writing itself, for example, can’t decide what it wants to be; it swings wildly from fancily archaic to dissonantly modern (Adam describes the Wisdom as ‘mumbo-jumbo’), with quick dips into the bizarrely juvenile (Lilith calls the angel Semangelof ‘the scariest of the three [angels]’ – ‘scariest’, as if she’s a child rather than a grown adult). Later, disappointed that she can’t find Asherah, Lilith literally zones out for a thousand years sitting in one spot, until another character comes along to info-dump everything that’s happened while she wasn’t paying attention. She immediately takes an enemy’s word for it that her long-lost companion could have returned to her any time he wanted, and gets mad about it, despite having every reason not to trust the person who told her this. While on the hunt for a woman with a specific birthmark, centuries later, it takes her sixteen years – of sleeping beside her, bathing her, dressing her, etc – to notice that the woman she’s hung her hopes on does not have this birthmark. And when she does find her prophet, she accepts that this woman ‘has to die’ despite no one providing any reason why this death has to happen. It’s ‘just because’.

‘The hero women have waited 6000 years for’? Hi, you made her an idiot.

(She’s also shallow. Her first thought upon meeting Eve? Is that Eve is ugly – so not-pretty that she doesn’t even have a reflection.

<So unremarkable was she, even the waters failed to mark her presence.>

Wow. Great sisterhood messaging there. Really.)

Or how about the worldbuilding? Marmery is, at first, superficially clever with this; I liked that there were other humans outside of Eden, worshipping other gods who were just as real as Yahweh and Asherah. I approved of the reveal that Asherah is and was known by other names in other places, before and after Eden. Marmery finds ways to give a nod to Asmodeus and Naamah – demonic figures often connected to Lilith in the folklore – and to explain what exactly Lilith is doing visiting babies in the middle of the night (also from the folklore).

But.

One of the biggest driving forces of the book is the existence (and attempted destruction) of the Underworld – later known as Sheol – which is a dark, terrible place. When we first encounter it, it’s ruled by Ereshkigal, the Sumerian queen of the dead. Cool. But as faith in Asherah wanes, the dead stop coming to this particular underworld. (Where else they might be going, if anywhere, is never explained.) They only start coming again when Lilith spreads the word of her. Sheol is clearly tied to faith in Asherah (or some form of her); only souls who know of Asherah end up there.

Except, no: later, we learn everyone ends up in Sheol. Where Ereshkigal is eventually replaced by Satan.

What??? How are all the souls of all the others who worship other gods ending up in Sheol? Speaking of, since Yahweh isn’t the only god, where are the rest of them? What are they doing? Do they have Wisdom of their own? Could Lilith appeal to them for help?

Marmery tried to be inclusive by saying other gods exist – but then forgets about them completely, breaking her own worldbuilding in the process. After we learn of their existence, they’re never brought up again; aside from a brief glimpse of Ereshkigal, we never see them, which makes absolutely no sense in context.

Then there’s the ending.

The magic-wand solution to all of humanity’s problems turns out to be for Lilith and her consort Samael to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life – because through them, the fruit’s effects will pass to all of humanity! Because they are the Mother and Father of humanity too, just as much as Adam and Eve were!

…Except they’re not. Not even close. They do have human descendants, it’s true, but those descendants are localised to the Middle East. Lilith discovered right at the very beginning that she and Adam weren’t the first humans at all; there were whole civilisations existing outside of Eden! Whose descendants therefore have no connection to Lilith or Adam! However you spin it, the vast majority of humanity does not come from Lilith; for her and Samael to eat the fruit would only affect some of humanity, and not even most of it, at that.

THIS MAKES NO SENSE. It’s the most hand-wavey nonsense I’ve ever seen. Frankly, it’s insulting to the reader, that we’re expected to buy this drivel.

And I haven’t even touched on the creepy gross bioessentialism yet.

Women Create, you see. Because pregnancy and childbirth! Women are connected to the Earth, are the keepers of the Wisdom, it’s wrong for women to be subjugated not because, you know, subjugation is inherently evil, but because women are Special.

<A woman’s body tethers her to this earth. We are wedded to this life, to its pleasures and its sorrows. Our bodies cycle like the seasons, we bleed with the moon. We yield children, as the earth yields its fruits.>

I am not going to write an essay on how womanhood is not tied to your ability to be pregnant or give birth, how you don’t have to ‘bleed with the moon’ to be a girl and how not everyone who does is a woman anyway. I don’t have the spoons to have this argument again, especially when I know how much this new agey Women PowerTM stuff appeals to so many cis women. I’ve already read the early reviews calling Lilith empowering and validating, with no thought to how this kind of philosophy is actively transphobic, ignores the existence of nonbinary people like myself, forces women who don’t feel this way about their femininity outside of the group, and shoves men into a tiny little cage. Yes, the patriarchy is awful and always has been. Telling men they can’t create won’t fix it, and the definitely-not-intersectional ‘feminist’ utopia you’re dreaming of has electric fences around it to keep me out.

<with all female power banished, it was a place of subjection and tyranny. Of perpetual stasis, not regeneration. Of Shalts and Shalt Nots issued by male authority. A place of masculine hierarchy, domination, and progress, unbalanced by the female urge to nurture, sustain, and renew.>

(Also? One throwaway line about how men aren’t born bad doesn’t negate you writing every male character – except the one related to you and the one who is a literal angel – as a misogynistic bigot or a spineless weakling. Finishing up with a neat little adage about how only when the two halves come together will everything be perfect rings pretty damn hollow when the entire book preceding it makes out that male ‘half’ to be awful without exception. Talking about halves at all is bioessentialist and transphobic! THERE’S MORE TO HUMANITY THAN MEN AND WOMEN. It’s 2023, why are we still having to have this conversation?)

Ultimately, this book is the story of Lilith languishing through history, looking to restore women’s rights. Which could have been, should have been, a really excellent story. But instead of letting Lilith do it herself, Marmery arbitrarily decides that Lilith needs a human prophet to do it, and sends her on a quest through time to find that prophet, instead. Why? The whole point of the modern, feminist take on Lilith is that she is independent and powerful in her own right; why can’t she spread the word of Asherah herself? ‘Because.’ That’s all the reason we get.

The whole premise of the book makes no sense; Lilith should have been the star, and she isn’t. She spends what should have been her story looking for others to raise them up. But even if she were the star, she’s a fairly one-dimensional character here, especially with the bouts of outrageous stupidity that hit her whenever Marmery requires it For Plot. The overlying (I’m not calling it underlying when there’s nothing the least bit subtle about it) message of this book is the kind of bioessentialist ‘feminism’ I thought we were done with decades ago, where women are magical because childbirth and the only good kind of men are the ones who worship them. It’s simplistic and it’s incorrect and it’s boring.

This is not my Lilith, and this book isn’t worthy of her.

Or of you, either. Skip this one and read something better instead – it’s not as if that bar is set especially high.

A sweeping, epic reimagining of the Biblical myth of Lilith, Adam's first wife who was said to have been cast out of Eden for refusing to be subservient to him. I enjoyed Nikki Marmery's perspective on Lilith as a woman and as a religious and cultural icon, casting her quest to save Eve from Adam as merely one step of a larger movement to rescue all women, all across history, from suppression and subjugation. The writing style was accomplished, but inconsistent; I didn't mind that it read like the Bible, but I did mind having to picture Adam saying things like "No way". And there were moments when I think the grandness of the story's scope caused some of the finer details to lose their emotional weight, which might be why I wasn't as wowed by the execution of the concept as I hoped to be. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed it.

Apologies to the author and publishers but I couldn’t finish this book. I had this farcical feeling throughout the half of the book I did read. Not at all what I expected

This book explored the character of Lilith, the first woman Adam's equal, that was expelled from the Garden of Eden. The book follows Lilith from her initial exile into present day; sharing stories various biblical figures and events. .I found this book to be very interesting. Not an easy read but an engaging retelling of the foundational myths of Christianity and much of modern society.

Lilith A Novel by Nikki Marmery

336 Pages
Publisher: Alcove Press
Release Date: October 17, 2023

Fiction (Adult), General Fiction (Adult), Biblical Fiction (Adult)

This is another retelling of the Lilith story. It is not much different than other fictional stories. As Lilith is my Goddess, I have read a lot of material about Her. This one is written from a more biblical perspective in the third person point of view. From the book description, I expected more.

DNFing at 3% -- just not for me. I hope this book finds its audience, and I'll possibly give it another try in the future, but it's not working for me at all at the moment.

A well-researched novel that nonetheless fell short for me. It leans heavily into a Biblical writing style, which while an interesting an impressive stylistic detail, made the novel dense and slow to get through. As a lapsed and largely cultural Jew I also feel like a lot of of the intricate biblical references flew over my head, probably not helped by the fact that it picks a solidly Christian approach to much Judeo-Christian lore. The dialogue also feels at odds with the rest of the writing - too modern in contrast with the heavy descriptive prose.

I liked the author's writing style and enjoyed the imagery used.

I can imagine 'Lilith' being a hit for those who enjoy the Greek story retellings. While this book wasn't my style, I can recognize that it was well done.