The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/category/culture/book-reviews)
The Wild Hunt offers reviews of books on topics of interest to Pagans, Heathens, Wiccans, Witches and other Polytheists. From Astrology to Tarot, Reconstructionism to Pagan Biographies.
“‘Shadow and Bone meets The Selection,'” the marketing promises, banking on glittering courts and will-they-won’t-they tension,” writes Beatrix Kondo in her analysis of the romantasy sensation. “What the book actually delivers is something else entirely—the first chapters of a feminist high fantasy saga with a queer and Pagan reading.”
Lyonel Perabo reviews four recent titles of interest to Pagan readers: Fröja’s Apples by Sara Bonadea George, The Dead of Winter by Sarah Clegg, Backwards into the Future by Eirik Storesund, and the new volume of the journal Heathenry by Asatru UK.
“A story set in Near becomes a mirror,” writes Beatrix Kondo, exploring folklore, fear, and the familiar stranger in V.E. Schwab’s novel “The Near Witch.” “What the mirror reflects is a community organized around the strategic management of its own fear.”
Alan U. Dalul reviews Christabel Jessica and Cecilia G.F.’s oracle deck, which focuses on masculine divinities from a variety of mythologies and traditions.
Manny Moreno reviews Stav Appel’s boxed set from Ayin Press, which includes the Jean Noblet Tarot de Marseille alongside a startling argument that the Marseille Tarot tradition reflects Jewish symbolism transmitted during a time of antisemitic persecution.
“Contemporary reclamations of ‘witch’ as feminist identity tend toward celebration,” writes Beatrix Kondo, “which Atwood declines. What she offers instead is something harder and more useful: these practices functioned as survival apparatus for populations the official world refused to protect.”
