Beltane is the season for growth and new beginnings. The Bee card (“Don’t drink all of life from one flower, for there are many to taste and many to explore.”) attracted me to this deck, and when I saw some of the other cards included, I knew this deck would be a wonderfully rich addition to my tarot and oracle practice.

Because, how absolutely beautiful are these cards? Each card’s message resonates with me, and has a beautiful prompt for reflection and journaling. The colour palette is muted, and the artwork gives off such calm and chill vibes that from the start, I can already see this being a deck I reach for when I need a bit of comfort and self-care. I also love the backs of the cards — the bee imagery and golden honey background give off that feel of renewal and possibility that comes with Beltane, and I just love the overall vibe of this deck.

The one snag for me is that the box is a bit snug; I find it hard to open, and a bit of a challenge to get the cards out. But the cards themselves are beautiful, with shiny gold foil edging. And unlike some of the larger, stiffer oracle decks out there, these ones are easy to shuffle. (I like using a riffle shuffle with bridge, and my hands aren’t big enough to make that work with many other oracle decks I’ve tried.)

The guidebook is lovely as well. While the one-liner prompts on the cards themselves already inspire deep reflection, the guidebook dives even deeper into the symbolism in each card. It also offers some concrete advice or messages that the card may be suggesting, so that helps for times when you’re looking more for quick answers than deep reflection/meditation.

The guidebook also includes some spreads, including one for interviewing your deck. That seemed a good way to get to know this deck better, so I’ve tried it below.

Main Takeaway: This seems like it’ll be a powerful, uplifting deck for my collection, one that can nourish me, boost my confidence, and remind me of the limitless potential within me.

1. What personality do you have?

Fertilizing. “Food is not the only thing that nourishes you, dear one. Be mindful of what you feed your soul.”

2. What is your strength?

Chant. “Hear me loud, hear me roar, for I am here in my truth.”

3. What is your weakness?

Sun god. “Come all, come now; expand into the skies and into the shadows below.”

I interpret this to mean the deck’s energy is very feminine and nurturing, and perhaps I’ll need to dig a bit deeper if I want to understand the more masculine aspects of the readings.

4. How will this deck help me grow?

Pegasus. “Break free, dear one, spread wide and far for you aren’t containable — you are limitless.”

5.  When should I call on this deck for guidance?

Fae. “Not everything is as it may seem. Be cautious, dear one, for these is a story beneath the tale.”

I interpret this to mean that this deck will be helpful when my spidey senses are tingling, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. This deck can help me connect to my intuition, and figure out what I’m picking up on but not quite seeing.

6. What is the best way to work with this deck?

Cow. “May the embrace of all that is nurturing you awaken in all that you are becoming.”

7. What will our relationship be like?

Flower crown. “Wear your power proudly and unapologetically for it is your birthright and is eternal like the soul.”

Overall impressions: This was my first reading with this deck, and I love how clear the overall message was. This deck works well with me on an intuitive level. I can see myself using it often, and I’m excited about doing deeper dive reflections, meditations, and journaling with it.

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Thank you to Thomas Allen Ltd for a review copy of this oracle deck in exchange for an honest review.

The Astronaut and the Star is an opposites-attract, forced-proximity romance between a driven astronaut and a happy-go-lucky actor who get together when Reggie Hayes has to train Jon Leo on a desert space camp to prepare him for a movie role. I’m a huge space nerd and sci fi buff, and I love nerdy romances, so I had high hopes for this one. Plus, the cover is gorgeous!

The story did pick up part-way through, but I got off on a slow start for me. Part of it is the character of Reggie herself. I’m all for super ambitious and driven heroines, and I’m a major sucker for emotionally complex main characters, but I just found it really hard to root for her either professionally or personally.

First, I get she’s a brilliant astronaut, and I like the development of her character arc, from someone who wants to do everything herself to someone who recognizes she needs help from time to time. The author also did a good job showing the toxicity of her family situation, and it’s believable that someone with those experiences would be so prickly. And I do like that her major life goal is to be the first woman on the moon. But her individualistic attitude isn’t just a character quirk to overcome on a personal level; it would legit be a major liability in space, where refusing to let other people do their jobs might literally get people killed. So the whole time she was working to prove herself ready to go to the moon, I couldn’t get behind it at all. Honestly, I felt bad for the other astronaut who’d been originally booked to train Jon Leo, who seemed legit excited about the opportunity until Reggie strong-armed him and threw around her mom’s name to get the job instead.

And then there’s her dynamic with Jon. Jon is the sweetest golden retriever puppy kind of a guy. A bit clumsy, and a bit disorganized, but overall, from the very beginning, he seemed like a great guy. And Reggie’s job was literally to train him in collecting soil samples and stuff so he can use that knowledge for his movie. So when she instead gives him busy-work, purportedly to keep him out of trouble, it really pissed me off. Especially since the entire exercise was a simulation in the first place — the rocks they collected didn’t matter for space science, and they weren’t actually researching astronaut stuff in the desert. The entire purpose of the exercise was to teach Jon Leo how to do it like a real astronaut. So Reggie had no data integrity to worry about protecting, and by giving Jon useless busy-work, she was downright failing at the very job she had bullied her way into getting in the first place.

And the way she treated Jon was just really mean. She’d catch herself and apologize, but some of the stuff she said was just mean-spirited, and totally undeserved. So it was forever before I could even buy into their relationship. Particularly since Jon was such a sweetheart throughout, Reggie’s barbs at times just felt more like bullying than sexy banter.

The story did improve for me around the halfway mark, once Reggie started opening up to Jon, and actually letting him do the tasks she was hired to teach him to do in the first place. I loved the Christmas scenes, how these showed the differences in their respective family dynamics, and how they responded to each other’s families. And by the end of the novel, I was on-board with their happily-ever-after.

I just wish it didn’t have to take so long for me to get to that point.

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Thanks to Thomas Allen Ltd for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Egg Island is a picaresque, coming-of-age novel about two teenagers on the road towards a mythical place called Egg Island, where reportedly, there’s a hole in the ozone. Julia believes her absentee father is on that island; Colt, whom she meets at a gas station, seems mostly along for the ride. Along the way, they meet random characters who spout bits of wisdom and a turtle they half-jokingly adopt as their child. They also eat cans of beans and tell random stories that seem imbued with layers of meaning about life and existence.

In short, Egg Island is the kind of novel I can imagine English classes mining for lots of rich material for discussion, and book clubs with a more literary bent having long, complex conversations over. Many readers will likely enjoy it. It’s not quite my kind of thing, but I can imagine finding it profound when I was in university, and it’s an engaging enough read that I finished the novel.

But it’s definitely the kind of story that will appeal to certain types of readers. I personally found Julia and Colt somewhat pretentious, but like in a Dawson’s Creek kind of way, in that I was likely just as pretentious when I was their age, and thought myself deep and profound. There’s that kind of youthful existentialism in both Julia and Colt. Julia goes through an entire dream sequence where she grows up, grows old, and dies, and the main takeaway is that she had died without ever having learned the meaning of life. In turn, Colt tells a whole complicated story about a man losing his grip on reality, only to later reveal it was an odd story involving his family.

The novel ends with a fitting sense of open-ended resolution. Whatever change Julia and Colt have experienced is subtle, but their impact on each other seems profound.

Overall, I found it okay. It’s not quite absurd enough to really push the envelope, not quite heartfelt enough to really tug at the heartstrings, not quite funny enough to be truly entertaining, and not quite clever enough to really stand out in terms of literary form. It’s quiet with just enough of an edge that you know the tone the author meant to set. Like I said, I think some readers will find it brilliant, and will find lots of things to talk about in their reading of it. I’m just not one of them.

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Thank you to Dundurn Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.