Lilith: The Woman Who Walked Between Worlds by Margarita Yaz is a journey of love, self-discovery, resilience, and enlightenment that stretches across two time periods and two individual perspectives. Lilith is a young Italian woman who is working in Florida, gaining overseas experience, before deciding where she wants to head in life. When she meets Marek, the attraction is instantaneous, and the pair seem eternally destined for each other. Despite their overwhelming passion and apparent commitment, betrayal sees them break apart. It is ten years after the betrayal that Marek’s story begins to unfold, and readers start to understand the karmic influences from medieval Florence that underpin their torrid but fated relationship. Through Lilith’s journey, we begin to comprehend that souls do indeed continue on from one lifetime to another, and not everything about a person can be explained or understood by looking just at what is in front of us.

Lilith is an interesting concept as it explores the karmic threads that exist across eons and can influence how we react today and how others may sometimes appear to react in a way we consider totally irrational. Author Margarita Yaz has created two interesting and multi-faceted characters in Lilith and Marek. What I appreciated about Lilith was her resiliency, her ability to bounce back from what was a devastating betrayal by the person she felt was her soulmate. The idea that although decisions are ours to make and life is not predestined, the concept that the people, circumstances, and events that occur around us are ultimately for our own benefit, even if the benefit is as yet unseen, is something that rings through this narrative. I enjoyed the elaborate descriptions, which allow us to swiftly switch from the current perspective to that of medieval Florence without feeling a disconnect. I was pleased to see that Lilith’s journey is far from complete and look forward to a deeper exploration of the metaphysical world which these characters inhabit. Any author who leaves the reader with thoughts, ideas, and conundrums about a character and their circumstances has achieved something special, and this story does that for me. I highly recommend this read.

Margarita Yaz’s Lilith follows Lilith, a 21-year-old physics student from Rome who spends a summer working at a beach bar in St. Augustine, Florida. There she meets Marek, a water sports businessman whose instant connection with her turns the temporary trip into a romance that changes the direction of both their lives. Lilith returns to Italy to finish university, where her fascination with quantum theory gives language to recurring dreams she has had since adolescence. Years later, Marek begins seeing stone streets from another era beside the face of a woman who seems known to him. Those visions draw him to Florence, where sleep carries him into the fourteenth century as a Florentine nobleman facing a family-arranged marriage. His encounter with Mona, a celebrated singer living under noble protection, places his bond with Lilith inside a history spanning centuries.

Margarita Yaz’s Lilith is a fantastic speculative romance with a seriously visionary approach to time travel. Yaz knows exactly how chemistry reaches readers when the attraction feels natural within the story. The hurricane shelter scene shows why, as rain pounds the roof during Marek’s conversation about his father, giving that attraction a private intensity that feels completely genuine. Yaz brings the same imagination to time travel through physical details that give the concept something readers can picture. Marek opens a box from his mother. Inside sits his father’s old ring, marked by a faint crest that turns family inheritance into a tantalizing sign of what may be possible. Yaz commits fully to the speculative reality she has created, giving Lilith an atmosphere that belongs entirely to her work. I highly recommend Lilith to readers seeking romantic time travel touched by myth with genuine romantic heat firmly at its heart. Very highly recommended.