Lilith

• Author: Eric Rickstad
• Genre: Thriller
• Publication Date: March 19, 2024
• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Thank you to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

From the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of I Am Not Who You Think I Am—a New York Times Thriller of the Year—comes Lilith, an incendiary powerhouse of a novel that strikes straight at the wounded heart of America.

After her son Lydan suffers traumatic injuries in a school shooting, single mom Elisabeth Ross grows enraged at men in power. If they won’t do anything to help end this epidemic of violence, she will. Believing it’s her destiny, she sets out to awaken the world to the cowards these men are and commits her own shocking act of violence.

Going by the name Lilith—the first wife of Adam who fled Eden rather than serve a man—she posts a video of her crime that reverberates throughout society.

Praised by some, demonized by others, and sought by the FBI and vigilantes alike, Elisabeth must keep her identity a secret as she tries to care for her son.

As events take startling twists, Elisabeth begins to question her act of violence and the very roots and mythology of violence itself. Was her act justified or has she become the monster that the original Lilith was accused of being?

When the FBI draws closer, and Lydan starts to display odd, terrifying behavior, Elisabeth plots to avoid capture and keep her son safe, fearing she’ll never escape what she’s done without losing her son forever.

Written with Rickstad’s singular command of language, human insight, and unnerving suspense, Lilith is a tale of our times. Tragic and profound, it echoes in the mind and lingers in the blood.

Going into this, I knew that it wasn’t going to be an easy read. Any book that involves a school shooting isn’t going to be an easy one, but I also firmly believe in reading things that make me uncomfortable in order to grow. Challenging my mind is a worthy pursuit, and school shootings is something I hear on the news a lot, but haven’t read much about yet. My generation was probably one of the last to go through school without having lockdowns or active shooter drills, having completed high school only a couple of years before Columbine happened and forever changed how we approach education in our country.

I’m going to start my review out by saying that there are some heavy trigger warnings involved with this book. Although I didn’t write them down as I went because it’s an audiobook, some major ones include school shooting, death of a child, and gun violence. But the author managed to always stay on the side of respectful storytelling and didn’t veer into trauma porn, which is something that I appreciated. So if you can manage getting through the triggers, this is a book that is well worth the read.

The narrator for this audiobook, Brittany Pressley, did a wonderful job with this story. She told it with sensitivity, yet still brought out all the emotion in the book. Her narration had me so invested in the story, which was already a gripping one.

While the book starts out with a scene that quickly evolves into a school shooting, Elisabeth Ross starts the day as a single mom and elementary school teacher, she becomes a heroine in the eyes of the media. Yet her actions aren’t appreciated by everyone, and as always, the actual event is drowned out by political chatter over gun control. Which leads me into how the shooting is actually the smallest part of the story—we never learn the identity of the shooter or why they targeted an elementary school, but it doesn’t really matter in this book. It’s the shockwaves within the community and the country that made up the actual story.

It isn’t until after the dust begins to settle, and Elisabeth learns the extent of the changes to their lives that are necessitated by Lydan’s injuries, and the effect that this will have on his life in the long-run. But as soon as the gun control debate starts raging, and the anti-gun control advocates start lobbying, I couldn’t help but think that any normal person would snap. How is someone supposed to keep functioning after their life, their routine, their job, their child has been torn apart by a school shooting, and people immediately see this tragedy as a political football in the long-running debate over gun control.

And so, the story becomes something more. One event has ripple effects, which leads to another event that would never have happened otherwise, leading to a cascade of events that rapidly spiral out of control. I found myself on the edge of my seat, and wracked with emotions—not just for what Elisabeth and Lydan go through, but for the families who experience this horror in real life, for the kids who have to go through active shooter drills regularly despite limited evidence of their effectiveness and the potential to traumatize students, and for the teachers who have to go through all of this right along with their students.

Ultimately, this was a story that grabbed my attention immediately, and didn’t let go until the very end. The chapters are short, and I couldn’t put this book down—I finished it in a single day, binge reading this with only a short break for a meal. I loved how it was written, how things unfolded, and how tense the story got the more involved it became. Seeing the chain of events that were unleashed by the initial school shooting was surprising in its scope, but in recent years, we’ve seen how quickly movements can spread, and gun control seems to be one of the longest running issues that our country has been ignoring. This book makes it seem like a reckoning is coming, and suddenly, the events in this story don’t seem unrealistic, at all. But overall, this was an outstanding read that I can enthusiastically recommend, as long as you can handle the triggers.

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