Art Nouveau Tarots
by:  Lo Scarabeo 

ISBN 0-7387-0008-8
Price $19.95

In beginning this reading, I have to first convey my extreme disappointment.  Years ago, my mother had a Tarot deck that I deeply enjoyed because to me, the people in the cards looked like people in our lives.  My mom even refers to this phenomenon in her own Tarot book, calling it the "Folks Next Door" Deck.  Somehow, the deck got away from her (my mother has a plethora of decks and is wont to give them away quite spontaneously, trusting they will come back to her if she was meant to have them... evidently, this one was not because it never did, much to my chagrin).  That deck was also called the Art Nouveau deck and looked like this:

And I loved them, evidently not in such a way that my mother picked up on because away they went.  Imagine my delight when I saw that Llewellyn was offering the Art Nouveau deck!  Imagine my dismay when I received it and it looked like this:

I don't know these folks at all!  *pout*  I do, however, enjoy this deck now that I've put aside my disappointment and evaluated it on its own merits.  Still maintaining the lovely stain-glassed window effect that Tiffany used to make the Art Nouveau style famous, the cards also embody the classic winding greenery of the Nouveay in a wonderful way.  The pastel colors are inviting and pleasing to the eye and the characters interact in a way that invites intuitive response.  For my own tastes, I found the imagery of the people to be disproportionately large to the other items on the card front, making it difficult, for lack of a better turn of the phrase, to see around them and get a feel of where they are and what they are doing.  For a reader who depends strongly on "getting into the head" of the images on the cards to wake up the intuitive process, it's a bit limiting. 

As with most of Lo Scarabeo's decks, the book is fairly worthless and serves mainly to take up the extra space in the box that the cards leave.  It's written in several languages and provides little more than the sparsest of interpretations.  That means I've got to dock a pentacle for the book once again, so this very worthy deck is stuck with:

4 pents out of 5

Reviews by Delena Rasbold