Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First of all, absolutely none of the tables were entirely visible on my Kindle. So technically speaking this is not something I'd recommend. Also some paragraphs were rather unnaturally broken and separated. As far as the content goes, if Rachel Pollack's word salad 78 Degrees of Wisdom is the Finnegan's Wake of tarot books, this book is Infinite Jest - and neither of those are compliments. Wen is incredibly ambitious and basically shows of for one thousand pages hoping the historical references and name dropping would blind you to how vacuous and empty her erudition is. She invents controversies that don't exist such as the yin/yang controversy for the emperor card which perhaps is a thing on tarot instagram,but is certainly not a thing in serious literature. Then, her descriptions of cards will help no one and least of all tarot beginners. She makes connections that basically demonstrate why people laugh at esoteric studies, such as her connecting the high priestess with the Japanese word for lion or tiger or whatever. Once you make that connection, you might as well interpret the card as telling you to eat ramen noodles because she has long hair. She objects to fortune telling and divination, yet literally every example she gives is precisely of that. She flaunts her partial knowledge of European history, yet she fails to notice elementary Biblical and historical references on cards such as the death card or four of swords, etc. She writes about disproven fringe theories on the origins of tarot which do no one any good, especially with the amount of research done on how tarot cards were invented and why. I like that she has a very precise tone and that she structures things on charts and tables (which I wasn't able to see fully because the Kindle book didn't show them) but that's not what makes a serious researcher. You must select what's meaningful and not include every crazy fringe idea out there. Not everything works and not every approach is equally good and until that is part of tarot studies, don't be surprised that no one will look at it twice, no matter how useful a tool it might be. I sound a little angry in this review and I guess I am. I enjoyed reading it and debating her in my mind while I was reading it, but if this is meant for "rational" audiences and if it's meant to attract new people to tarot or to introduce tarot to beginners, then it's an abject failure. If she would rework the book and clean up the content, shorten it and for the love of whatever you believe in, find an editor for it, then it could be a decent overview of different approaches to interpretation of tarot cards. But in this form, it's a rough draft in need of more work. I don't have the problem with ambition or the scope, but with the sloppy approach, bad logic and "anything goes" masked as rigorous thinking.