First, I’d like to thank NetGalley and John Hunt Publishing Ltd. for providing me with a free ARC of this book. I must admit, the title managed to both draw me in and push me away, with the words “bards” (positive bias) and “angels” (negative bias). Having now finished the book, I feel as though I better understand, or at least am more comfortable with, Iona Jenkin’s use of the term “angel”, but to me it still carries a personal stigma. For that reason, I wouldn’t want to have my own “angel”, the way she describes in her book, because I think too many negative things about “angels” and the Christian/Catholic church system. Instead, I’d prefer to imagine a nymph or sylph, a faery or satyr, a mermaid or siren, or even my very own muse. Nature-based spirits founded in myths throughout the ages hold much more intrigue and attraction for me than the narrow tales of “angels”. So, while the concept of her imagined conversations with an angel guide are interesting, to say the least, and I may even be a little jealous that I don’t often feel capable of conjuring such a scene for myself, I don’t necessarily want that.

Now, Iona does say that she thinks of angels in a much broader sense than they are referred to in the Judeo-Christian literature and she never ceases discussing her relationship with the land in which she lives (Wales) and where she grew up (England), and that she reveres nature, but she doesn’t personify it into these angel spirits, which I found curious.

I will be reviewing this from the perspective of a self-proclaimed SJW or social justice witch. I care about social issues. I care about respecting indigenous cultures and dismantling oppression in all forms. I’m anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-gerrymandering, anti-corporation, and anti-profits-over-people. I’m pro-women, pro-intersectionality, pro-LGBTQ2+, pro-immigrant, pro-education, pro-worker’s rights, pro-socialism, pro-democracy, pro-decriminalization, pro-prison reform, pro-science, and I believe in the inalienable rights of all humanity. I’m progressive. I tend not to go easy on books like this because of my perspective.

From the writing, I think Iona has an affiliation with the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (OBOD) although she never quite elaborates on this. She mentions a group ritual that she took part in that made her feel like she was part of a practicing spiritual group that she hadn’t really experienced before as an adult with a nature-based spirituality. She [mostly] correctly states that Druidry is a philosophy rather than a religion, and so one can be a druid and a Buddhist, for example, or some other religion, because they do not contradict each other. I feel like this is something of an oversimplification, but I am not an expert. I think Druidry can be its own religion, too, that being certified with OBOD clarifies that, but I have not yet earned those rights. She also cites several books on my shelf as her sources, books that I have not yet read but written by authors knowledgeable about Druidry: Frank MacEowan, Tom Cowan, Philip Carr-Gomm, and Penny Billington. Reading books by these authors will surely prove invaluable on my own path to Druidry and, considering how she’s farther along on her path than I am on mine, I’m sure Iona must know better than I what those authors consider to be the final word on whether Druidry can be a religion. Because a thing can be both a religion and a philosophy. Buddhism is that. You can be a Christian Buddhist. You can be an atheist Buddhist. They do not contradict. But you can also spend your life in a monastery, dedicating every moment to the pursuit of enlightenment, and I can’t imagine calling that just a philosophy. Spirituality can be a fickle thing, and so too can be language, certainly the English language. Word choices matter and this one little sentence has caused, hmm, well, what do you call an ear worm that’s really an “eye worm” and that came from a book, not from something you encountered with your personal senses? It’s irksome, is what it is. For some reason, my mind doesn’t want to drop this, and it’s tainting the rest of my review. Okay, I’ll keep trying to push through and ignore these little tugs from my inner nitpicker.

I was irritated by the formatting of many things in this book. I’m aware this is an ARC, but I do not know how much editing or proofreading has gone into it at the point that they issue these. Has there been any? I ask because – and it’s possible this is an intentional style choice – there is almost never any punctuation or separation via space in the author’s poetry that begins nearly every chapter. As a poet, this too, got to me. She also used an excessive number of unnecessary commas in her personal essay-ish writing (the bulk of the book), while missing the placement of some basic ones. Again, this could be or might have been fixed in editing. I don’t know and I can’t really knock much off for this, because as an ARC reader, I ought to know that the books are not quite done when they end up in my hands (although, Clytemnestra was so very nearly perfect already).

There are small, suggested exercises at the end of most if not all chapters. These don’t take long to do but I didn’t really take action towards any of them until the very end, when she asked us to make a list of things that inspire me. That’s not a judgment on the quality or length of the exercises, however, it’s just that I usually don’t stop reading to do exercises in books unless I’m doing a book that I know ahead of time will be specifically for activities, not reading. I like to really sit down and read when I’m reading, not stop every chapter and go to my computer and write, or get out paper, or my tablet, or what have you. The exercise I did was good and helpful, although I can’t really turn it off; I can’t really stop finding things that inspire me, which is probably actually a good thing. I imagine the more I’m inspired by, the more likely I am to be encouraged to do something about it, right?

I enjoyed reading about Iona’s childhood and her solace found in gardens. I took comfort there beside her. I found her descriptions of the Chalice Well and the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew, discovered as an adult, to be soothing, as well. I found myself wistful, yearning for these places I’d never been and had never even seen, because I don’t have sanctuary spaces like them. I don’t really have any sacred space outside anymore. I could, and I should, but I don’t.

I was a little worried when Iona started describing her tourism of Native American sites of significance. I thought she was going to make the error so many white and/or British people make that mystifies Native American tribes (who are all unique and different from each other) and further others them and makes of them an ethnic, exotic spectacle. However, she did pretty well in this regard, only making a few comments about how special and magic Native Americans all are. (They aren’t unicorns. They’re people just like you and me, and a lot of them are only 1/32 Native or less, with no tribal connections and no sense of their heritage or inherent love for the land, either. Despite colonizers' best efforts, tribes do still exist and the continuance of Native educations through their language reclamation and outreach programs, but a lot of the tribal members Iona was referring to, the Southwestern Native Americans, are deeply impoverished through years of unfair “trade” with white Americans who have stolen their land and their heritage and continue to give very little back in return. People forced to use ancestral skills to create pottery, with 80-year-old arthritic hands, in order to afford gas to heat their ramshackle homes, it’s just not good, it’s unethical, and it’s far from magical. They should be allowed to relax as respected elders, passing on their knowledge instead of working ‘til they can’t. We ALL need to care for them, protect and nourish them, and treat them like the treasures they are.)

Iona did use the slur “gypsy” once, at the very end, which was "mighty white" of her. It’s such a disturbing trend. No matter how many times the ethnic Romani people stand up and decry its usage, calling it out as the slur it is, white people insist on clinging to that word to its dying breath, on one hand using it to describe a “free-spirited” lifestyle while on the other using a shorthand form of the word to say they were “gypped” when they think they paid too much for something or were shortchanged in an exchange. I feel like I’m too forgiving of the use of this word, but it’s disgustingly common. Since re-joining the Pagan community around five years ago, I’ve seen this word appropriated and used so much that it would lose all meaning if not for the very real people it hurts. They have stepped up, they have said it’s a hurtful term, they have asked for it to be marked a slur, they have asked for people to stop using it, they have asked to not be called it, and yet it continues to this day, a nasty tradition of discrimination, of using a word positively to describe oneself and changing its definition as desired to describe people of other ethnicities negatively. “Gypsy” is a slur. Period. This isn’t a debate. White people don’t get to weigh in on how cool and free-spirited the word makes them feel. That isn’t how this works.

Despite all these flaws, some of which really bother me, I have to rate this book four out of five stars (4/5 ****). This may surprise some of you, since I’ve had a lot of negative things to say so far. However, what I haven’t mentioned yet is that Iona Jenkins has a wondrous, flowy way with words. I’m not much of one for alcohol, but I imagine her book is a bit like a smooth drink that mentally transports one to a Celtic country like Wales, Scotland, or Ireland. Whiskey, maybe? Smooth Irish whiskey? Is that a thing? See, I don’t even know. It was almost too easy to find myself transported from one page to another, without recounting how I got there. I’d stop where I was, turn back a few pages, and reread it, only to discover that I already knew what was written there. I just hadn’t even registered the reading process. I don’t really know how else to describe it. Her words have the ability to transport someone to someplace softer, where a gentle mist hangs in the air, diffusing the light and making it seem as though the space between you and I is nothing but pure energy, and this even to someone as bitter and cynical as me.

If you want to read a book that falls somewhere between myth and memoir, that leaves you feeling better than when you started, more centered, more at peace, and that might even help you become more creative in all the things you do; normal, mundane, or magical ­– you should probably read this book. And if you walk away believing in magic - or goodness – a little more than you did before, well then, it was worth it, wasn’t it?