Ready to dive right in and transform your life in a twinkling? Then Year of the Dark Goddess is not the book you are looking for.
Oh, it can absolutely bring you life-changing transformation, but not in a barn-burning, upset-the-table way. Instead, Vesta offers guidance through a series of small and manageable practices that rely on consistency, not showmanship. This is a book to WORK through to effect change in your life.
As such, I cannot recommend it to anyone who is going through a "rough patch." (Which makes it tricky in these modern times, so you may just want to ignore me if you feel called to do this work.) Year of the Dark Goddess is a guide to the times when we are caught up in deep grief, rage, jealousy, severe illness, and even madness. And Vesta offers tools for the next cycle of "hard" that you go through (because there will be a next time, there always is).
"The work of the Dark Goddess is to make visible our rites of passage and initiations—individual and collective—so that we may begin to integrate and celebrate the wholeness they bring to us. (p. 5)
This is a deep book, and I did not have a year to work through it before writing this review. I am fortunate in that I have been working with the Dark Deity for decades now, and so found this work accessible in a way that many might not without having done the work.
Vesta's poetry called to me, her writing is a story-telling gift, and her drawings insightful. There is no "dark" place she does not enter, no scary trope she does not address. This is one of the best books I've read in several years.
Highly recommended.
~review by Lisa McSherry
Author: Lara Vesta
Weiser Books, 2024
pp. 234, $18.95
