text: I have studied the tarot for nearly 5 years and keep an open mind whenever a new book appears on the market.  Edain McCoy, who has written some wonderful New Age material, strikes an off-putting note in this one.  The spreads are certainly imaginative and are perhaps insightful to her own method of tarot interpretation, but convey confusing and ambiguous directions to the reader who is trying to understand her card placements.  In several of her spreads she conveys that a card's placement at a certain point in the spread "may or may not" mean some karmic element at play.  The whole exercise of creating a spread is to pinpoint with a degree of accuracy the situation you wish to define.  Therefore, when a card "may or may not" mean something, that interpretation could significantly change on whether you "may or may not" interpret it that way, leaving the interpreter open to rationalizing a card's meaning.  Tarot cards are intuitive, not rational, and their meanings can best be intuited when their placement is clearly defined without ambiguity   It is difficult to have it both ways and I found working with these spreads difficult.  Imagine doing a Celtic Cross reading and the first position "may or may not" be the root of the issue.  These spreads speak very clearly to the author, but not so to the reader.  I rate it 2 stars for depth and insight into Karma and past lives, but the explanations are too ambiguous.
  