A review by laurareads87
A Year In The Wildwood: Explore The Wildwood Tarot by Alison Cross

informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

3.0

A Year in the Wildwood is a companion to the Wildwood Tarot by Mark Ryan and John Matthews and with art by Will Worthington. It is written by Alison Cross, who administers the deck’s website, and is based largely on content that has appeared thereon. 

The core of the book is comprised of entries for each card in the deck that follow an order based on the Wheel of the Year, with suggested dates for each card constituting a year-long exploration of the deck card by card. The suit/season pairings will be familiar to Druidry practitioners – air/Arrows for spring, fire/Bows for summer, water/Vessels for autumn, and earth/Stones for winter – and the introduction offers suggestions for how to proceed through the book with the note that if these dates don’t work for the reader, they can of course proceed at any pace and in any season they wish. I completed this book, journalling my way through, based on (approximately) the dates suggested. 

The appendices at the back of the book include reference charts for the date correspondences for every card in the deck (sorted into a chart for the majors, the courts, and the minors), a single card reading prompt for each of the 8 wheel holidays, suggestions for exploring the significance of symbols that appear in multiple cards in the deck, a set of prompts following the ‘Daft Days’ (26 December to 6 January), and some web links to material related to the deck. 

I like the concept of this book a lot – Wildwood is a very seasonally rooted deck and so the idea of working through it over a year is really appealing. I like the card/date correspondences, the charts, and many of the journalling prompts (some of which I repurposed as spread positions); I also like the solstice/equinox single card prompts in the appendix at the end. I like how the author has included introductory material that explains the genesis of this book and its different versions. 

I did find the book rather inconsistent – some card entries have journal prompts, others don’t; some of these prompts feel open ended and inclusive, others feel very limited in who they might apply to. Sometimes the entry gave me lots to work with, other times I had to deviate quite strongly from it and do more work myself to come up with something meaningful to explore while journalling. The core of this book – the card entries spanning the year – is also very short; it spans page 23 to page 165, but the font is massive (like, maybe 14pt sans serif). I don’t necessarily object to large font – it can make a book more accessible, certainly – but I mention it to give a sense of how much content is actually here. 

There are definitely some issues here in terms of inclusion (or lack thereof) – some uncritical gender binarism (more than in the Wildwood guidebook, for comparison) and use of ‘tribe’ as a generic term for ‘friend group’ in ways that are not great. There are also some stylistic aspects of this book that don’t work for me; I think these are ultimately rooted in it being a compilation of web posts. Using CAPITALS FOR EMPHASIS like you’re shouting in an email feels really jarring in book context, for example, as do some of the strangely placed exclamation marks. The book definitely would’ve benefitted from more editing between website and print. 

Overall, I think that if you love the Wildwood Tarot you’ll get something out of this book. I enjoyed my year I spent with it (I would’ve quit otherwise) and I got a lot out of journalling my way through it. It is an enjoyable way to explore the deck card by card. This said, it’s not one I feel like I need to keep on my shelf for future reference, and I don’t think it has as much substance as the two other books that go with this deck (the guidebook that comes with it and Wild Magic).