This book is awesome!!! So much great information and presented in a fascinating manner. Wonderful mix of information that is very easy to digest. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on my review.

This book features a mix of various traditions. It starts of course focusing on African divination, but the very next chapter goes on to talk about divination in other cultures.



It also talks about Orishas, Santeria, Yoruba, and more. I was already familiar with Orishas because they are highly popular in the African-Brazilian culture and I lived for many years very close by. But everything else was very new to me.


I really enjoyed to find so much information, and for so many different aspects than intertwine with each other for various reasons, like immigration and so on. Yet, you have to notice, that because of that, the information about each topic is brief, since the book needs space to be able to feature all of them. I believe this makes for a great beginner book. A nice introduction, that you can then use as a guide and look up for more extensive information in other books or online. In other words, is a nice starting point for someone new that doesn't even know where to start learning about this particular topic.


Something else to notice is that this book goes beyond the divinatory practices and extend to the religion behind them. I found this information fascinating, but if you are only looking to learn for the divinatory practice and nothing more, this book might not be for you.


I found the information included to be very educational in anthropologic terms and belief systems. Yet, the book itself tells you that to perform this kind of divination you require to undergo an initiation process with a priest or priestess of the religion.

I have always loved cowrie shells, from when I was a child and my aunt brought one back for me from a trip to Hawaii. I never knew they could be used for divination!

This book was a strange mix. It's about African divination and has chapters on Orishas, Eshu, Yoruba, Santeria, etc., but in the introduction the author talks about God from an apparent Christian perspective. I found that a little odd, even though I know Voodoo and Christianity have combined in places like Haiti.

The second part of the book is about the actual method of divination with cowrie shells, about a third through the book. This gives instruction for prayers and preparation, followed by methods for reading with four cowrie shells, then the sixteen cowrie shells. These are given with lines in their native language and I have to admit, go on a bit for something with no translation.

The instructions for the actual reading methods are fairly straight forward. This would be a good book for someone studying the cultural influences behind these methods, but the necessity of steeping oneself in Yoruba or Santeria in preparation might not be to everyone's taste in practice.

There's an extensive glossary and overall I found it a very informative book.

I don't think I'm quite the audience for this book. While I enjoyed it and found it extremely educational, a lot of it was over my head. I work at a historic site in North Carolina that focuses on interpreting the experiences of the enslaved, and one of the artifacts found on site in one of the slave cabins was a cowrie shell that dates back to the time of the slave trade. We do a lot of interpretation surrounding the cowrie shell and talk about its use and significance in African American practices of the time period and its influences even now. So I was already familiar with some of the history and importance of cowrie shells. However, I still don't think I'm quite the audience for the book, just coming from a historian's perspective. Parts of it were extremely valuable and are just what I've been looking for in my research, but a good portion of the book is geared more toward those who practice the religion. Which is fine! That's not a criticism because I went into the book understanding that I was reading something with more of a religious basis rather than a strict history of cowrie shell divination.

One major thing that really bothered me about the reading process, though, was the random exclusion of letters in certain words, making the galley very difficult to read. For example, the word "different" was "dierent" and "affect" was "aect." Those are just a couple examples, which don't seem all that bad when thrown out as examples in a review, but when you're trying to read a book where every other sentence has a word without all of its letters, it becomes difficult and tedious to follow along. Whether or not that's an issue with the galley itself, my reading devices, or whatever other possible things could affect it, I don't know, but I did want to bring attention to it because it was annoying and frustrating to deal with.

Overall, I think this is an informative book written by someone who's incredibly passionate about the faith, which carries over into the writing and context of the book. Am I the target audience? No. But I still got enough out of it to find it worth a read.