Tarot, the 90s, and the reclamation of power in 'All Our Hidden Gifts' by Caroline O'Donoghue
We live in a time where everything moves so fast. Trends come and go before they can become truly ingrained in our cultural identity, and you have to keep your popular slang terms dictionary updated weekly.
Likes, views, engagement. Repost. Remove. Repost? Post something new. Is this cheugy? No one says cheugy anymore.
I feel like the 90s was the last “slow” decade. The internet was a novelty rather than a necessity, and content was bought and then consumed whole. We had Walkmans and cassette players (upgraded to CDs later), we would have to buy the single or the whole album if we liked a song or artist. Fast forwarding through a film was tricky business, the VHS ribbon whirring along and there was no guarantee you could stop it EXACTLY where you wanted it.
See: Me, aged 7, rewinding and rewatching a certain scene in ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ again and again and again. You know the one. #Snapetok was alive in me from a young age.
So I can understand this renewed love of the 90s. It was my childhood and I loved the 90s before I knew what it meant to live within a cultural pinpoint in time. Right on the cusp of the age of social media, it was the last moment teens and young adults were allowed to grow up slowly, without international peer pressure.
The 90s gave us Saved by the Bell and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The Spice Girls, Oasis, Nirvana, Hole, TLC, Limp Bizkit. Maeve in ‘All Our Hidden Gifts’ listens to a mixtape of the 90s on a Walkman she finds in the basement of her school. Cue Millennial panic.
It also makes me feel really old when Young Adult books refer back to the 90s like it’s a retro, out-of-reach decade... But the 90s now is how we would look at the 60s then. Isn’t that mind boggling? Because dude, the 60s? Now that was retro.
What never changes, however? The need to find some kind of control over our lives. Especially as a young person when so much change is happening both internally and externally, I know I needed something I could turn to to give me a way to make sense of it all.
Behold, my Tarot phase. Something I never really grew out of (it’s not a phase, mom) but 15 year old Sarah was REALLY into tarot. I think I was the first in my friendship group to buy a deck; a trip on the bus to town saw us all tumbling into one of those “new age” shops with the rocks and incense and a giant display of tarot.
I bought the “starter pack” and I still have that deck. It’s my favourite. The art is classic and I’ve held them so many times it almost feels like cheating to use a different deck.
Once I started doing readings for my friends (with the book propped open because unlike Maeve, I could not get the meanings of the cards to stick in my head) some of them felt just as excited by them as I did and went and bought their own decks.
It was a small slice of control which felt incredibly powerful as a teenager who was always treading water. In ‘All Our Hidden Gifts’ Maeve makes a comment about how rocks and crystals don't really do it for her, and I was the same. There was that one friend who went full Wiccan over it all. Spellbooks and crystals and candles. And whereas I liked the idea of it, it was just the tarot that held any real personal meaning for me,
I made a post on Instagram about why I really liked the way the author handled tarot within ‘All Our Hidden Gifts’. Especially when it came to the meaning, the history, and the handling etiquette. It’s refreshing to see tarot appear within fiction in a way that is still a little mysterious and exciting, but also very grounded and realistic.
Used appropriately, I think tarot can be really helpful. But because of its placement within popular culture, it is romanticised or placed under the umbrella of “occult”. This often leads to hysteria and misrepresentation. We see this when Maeve is quickly labelled a witch for a reading gone “wrong”.
Maeve learns some hard truths within the story, aided by the tarot, while also shown the way forward through introspection and getting comfortable with uncomfortable feelings and reactions. Forgiveness is something earned. You gotta do the work. There’s a really beautiful quote in the book about how you can’t force someone to forgive you, or be ok with you, you just have to accept whatever they will give you and work with that.
‘All Our Hidden Gifts’ is an emotional and mysterious read, it treads the line between the real and the uncanny, while also offering so much heart and inclusivity. I really enjoyed it.
You can check out Sophie’s full review here.
Written by Sarah.
