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A review by sapphistoire
Queering the Tarot by Cassandra Snow
3.5
I love tarot and I've had this book on my radar for some time now, so when I needed to make up shipping from a queer indie bookshop I finally decided to give this one a go. Overall, I really enjoyed it - it gave me a lot of new insight that I'm excited to go back over and annotate during a second reading. But it also does have some setbacks for me.
I will say that this is not the first book you should go to if you're new to tarot, this is more an add-on to your basic knowledge, so bear that in mind before picking this book up. But my main qualms come with what was and wasn't included in the book as a whole. I know a lot of tarot readers only read the upright cards, but many others, like myself, also like to use the reversed meanings too, but I think reversed meanings were only discussed very briefly for one or two cards and I would've liked to see more of that. Many other reviewers have also mentioned this, but this is a very Western-centric book and focusses mainly on white queer people who have some sort of a background in Christianity. Of course it's not possible to include everyone's experiences in a book but it would've been nice to see concrete efforts to be as inclusive as possible. Finally, some of the links to queerness were honestly such huge reaches like the author had only really considered a few cards in the deck but desperately needed to come up with reflections for others and just came up with any old nonsense. I would've rather there had been full transparency and the author had just said that there are some cards in the deck that relate really well to queerness and the queer experience but others not so much, instead of these vague ramblings that we got.
All in all, I'm glad I read this and can put the author's knowledge and teachings to use in my own readings, but I do think that this book is just a fun addition to your tarot collection and not necessarily a must read book!
I will say that this is not the first book you should go to if you're new to tarot, this is more an add-on to your basic knowledge, so bear that in mind before picking this book up. But my main qualms come with what was and wasn't included in the book as a whole. I know a lot of tarot readers only read the upright cards, but many others, like myself, also like to use the reversed meanings too, but I think reversed meanings were only discussed very briefly for one or two cards and I would've liked to see more of that. Many other reviewers have also mentioned this, but this is a very Western-centric book and focusses mainly on white queer people who have some sort of a background in Christianity. Of course it's not possible to include everyone's experiences in a book but it would've been nice to see concrete efforts to be as inclusive as possible. Finally, some of the links to queerness were honestly such huge reaches like the author had only really considered a few cards in the deck but desperately needed to come up with reflections for others and just came up with any old nonsense. I would've rather there had been full transparency and the author had just said that there are some cards in the deck that relate really well to queerness and the queer experience but others not so much, instead of these vague ramblings that we got.
All in all, I'm glad I read this and can put the author's knowledge and teachings to use in my own readings, but I do think that this book is just a fun addition to your tarot collection and not necessarily a must read book!