Book Review: Going Beyond the Little White Book

Recently I acquired the Gummy Bear Tarot, and I found the most amazing little white book ever. I loved the sayings and the feelings invoked by the descriptions of the cards. Well, given that I’ve possessed maybe a dozen packs of Tarot since I started reading, that’s quite a compliment. I found it even better, to be honest, than most proper books I have bought.

I’ll be honest. I had every intention of reading the important bits, just enough to be able to write an honest review, but I was unable to skip anything. I have enjoyed reading every page of this book. I didn’t enjoy the next day so much after a missed night’s sleep!

I’ll start at the beginning with the contents pages. I loved this book as soon as I saw the contents pages. One way I personalise my cards is to attach a little saying to each. For example, “Wish upon a Wishing Star”, “Pride Comes Before a Fall”, “When the Student is Ready the Teacher will Appear” and “Smooth Sailing” are all among my repertoire of key phrases. Well, Liz includes similar catchphrases right there, from the outset in the contents page. I love that I am given a sense of each card before I even go and take a closer look at it.

There are no illustrations so I suggest that you have your cards handy and sorted in order so that you can effectively use your own illustrations. That makes sense anyway… it’s how we become familiar with our cards. As an aside, when I first started learning tarot I chose a floaty deck which I could swim away into… but the Minor Arcana wasn’t illustrated. So I found it very difficult to learn their meanings. But as I started to keep a journal I printed a cheat sheet of the RWS tarot. That way, any notes I made were linked in my head to those illustrations… and with time I came to recall the images for each card automatically… which triggered what I had learnt about each card.

Beyond the Little White Book keeps to the time honoured format of introducing the cards, then going through first the Major and then the Minor Arcana. That makes it easy to navigate. But… I will say right here that the layout of each card is a little confusing. The standard format is:

I also prefer to have all of the information about the cards in their inverted position together. That saves me flicking between pages to find information about the same aspect. About the inverted cards. Most books give about 10% of space for each card to inversions. Liz gives them equal space to the upright cards. And that I respect, because I believe that using inversions effectively doubles the number of cards available to us and massively broadens the scope of our readings. I feel that each time a card is inverted, it’s because we have a lesson to learn from it. Often we might have a block in a particular area, or an issue that we are refusing to acknowledge. Inverted cards play the role of educating us about what we need to do to grow. And yet many readers hide from them. Most professional readers I have seen at fayres actually turn reversed cards the right way up as they lay them. That practise baffles me. Advice and guidance is exactly what the cards are about. Why hide from that? Liz doesn’t. She refers to them as Challenges, and guides us on how to address these challenges. Well handled indeed.

Each card has at least four pages dedicated to it… and these pages are full of gems. I found new phrases, aspects I hadn’t noticed before, on almost every card and I copied many over into my journal… and I recommend that you have your journal handy when you read this too. Each card concludes with a good handful of questions to ask yourself when the cards arises… and I suspect these questions will be very handy to guide new readers through their early readings.

I love the positive spin Liz puts on her cards and the valuable lessons she helps us learn about them all in each of their aspects. I highly recommend this book to readers at all levels. To beginners who want to get to know their cards. To confident readers who wish to develop their understanding of the cards in their reversed aspect. And to seasoned practitioners who want a gentle read, a pleasant trip down memory lane, reminding us of what we’d forgotten, and even pointing out plenty we had simply missed along our journey.

So, all in all I would say this is now the best book on tarot I have read to date. Thank you, Liz, for making those fourteen hours on planes very pleasant hours!