Learning Lenormand (Katz & Goodwin) – book review

Learning Lenormand (the system, not this book) has been a minefield for some of us who are new to it. It has been extremely confusing and difficult to navigate. Not because the information isn’t available on the Internet, neither because there aren’t enough strong Lenormand experts available to help us, but because of the many different approaches and the difficulty with which to bring them together into something coherently simple to the newcomer. In many ways this has been utterly overwhelming and has left me feeling like I would never get a grip on reading Lenormand.

This book, while it certainly doesn’t pretend to be the holy grail of Lenormand, has definitely given a beginner like myself a point from which to start unravelling this confusing system. This book along with the 10 week course by the same authors (material that was unfortunately largely omitted from the book) has helped me to see Lenormand in a manner that is a lot clearer than it had been before.

For a newbie like me the furore and rivalry between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘non-traditionalist’ voices has made matters worse. I simply want to learn to read the Lenormand cards without having to be subjected to different agendas, regardless of who is right or wrong. Trying to make head-or-tail of this system while feeling torn between the two camps has not helped me one bit toward learning what I’ve set out to learn, just the opposite in fact.

For this reason I want to thank Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin (Tarot Professionals) for writing about what is proving to be a very difficult subject for a newcomer like myself to get my head around, and for demystifying the subject to a large extent. It could not have been easy to write this book knowing that a sector of the Lenormand community would most likely crucify them for it. On the other hand, if Lenormand wasn’t so difficult to write about (or to teach) I guess there would be a lot more English books written on the subject by now. The authors of this book deserve acknowledgement for being the first in what I hope will be a long line of authors who will publish useful books on this system of fortune telling in the near future.

While I know that my personal Lenormand studies will not stop at this book, if anything it has only just begun, I do wish to acknowledge that it has given me the clarity to start wrapping my head around what was (until now) an extremely frustrating system to learn. Thank you Marcus & Tali!