HIGHLIGHTS
~seven prophesised (sorta) spoons
~granddaughter/grandma relationships FTW
~bondage gear saves the day
~useless oracles are useless
~don’t sneeze!

This had all the set-up to be an absolutely incredible book, and for the first little while, that’s exactly what VenCo looked like. Unfortunately, by the halfway mark it was pretty clear VenCo wasn’t going to live up to its potential, and while the book’s final pages were gorgeous, the actual ending of the story was seriously disappointing.

The prologue introduces us to the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, three women who together make up the Oracle that runs a mysterious corporation called VenCo. I absolutely adored this prologue, these three very different, powerful magical women introduced to us with some really lovely prose and the delicious promise of Serious Plot about to unfold.

But those three end up being incredibly minor characters, who, despite being at the top (or perhaps heart) of the American witch community, mostly just wring their hands and ‘can’t intervene’ for reasons that are never properly explained, despite them being the only ones with the full picture of what’s going down. I despise this nonsense trope of supposedly-powerful governing bodies having to be hands-off the plot Because Reasons, so as I gradually realised that was exactly what we had here, I became more and more annoyed with it.

<“We keep the network engaged, place our women in the right positions, tend to the coffers, but we do not step in. We are not coven witches and don’t have that power.”>

The spotlight of this book is on Lucky, a young Métis woman living with her elderly grandmother, who in turn is beginning to suffer from bouts of memory loss and confusion. Lucky is instantly hugely sympathetic, a Millennial with a fairly unconventional childhood who’s just trying to do her best by herself and her grandmother; a little bit snarky, possessed of a huge heart, a writer who doesn’t know what to write (oh, babs, we’ve all been there <3), who tries to dream big but feels crushed down by the world and the system. Let no one say Dimaline has not crafted the perfect MC for this story; I defy anyone who picks this book up not to adore Lucky immensely!

<“I am the daughter of Arnya St. James, defender of women, drinker of gin, fighter of assholes, a fierce half-breed from a long line of fierce half-breeds who took no shit and gave no fucks. I am a witch and I am here.”>

But although Lucky shines, and Dimaline’s prose and imagery is enchanting, the story itself starts to fall apart quickly. After finding the sixth sort-of-prophesised spoon, it’s Lucky’s job to first meet her now-coven – the owners/guardians of spoons one-through-five – and then track down the seventh spoon and the witch it belongs to. When all seven spoons are united, it’s supposed to be the start of a major change to or remaking of the world; there’s a heavy implication that this will involve hexing the fuck out of the patriarchy. And I was so on board for this!

That’s not what we got, though. Because these witches are…really kind of useless? For a book that talked about the power of women, people of colour, and queer people, it really didn’t walk the walk. There’s a little bit of dream-walking, but the majority of the coven spends the majority of the book staring into a bowl of water trying – and failing – to get a vision of something useful. Apart from a brief break to get hammered – which is somehow the only way to acquire the info Lucky needs to get started on her quest – holders of spoons one-through-five spend the ENTIRE BOOK huddled together in a single house out of fear of one (1) bad guy, who they are apparently completely unable to defend themselves against – and forget going on the offensive, because that’s just not going to happen.

These are supposedly the world-defining witches of the age??? The ones who will shape history and usher in a glorious new utopian era??? How???

And to be honest, the whole girl-power! BIPOC-power! Queer-power! messaging reads as incredibly muddled and messy. Not in a ‘real people are messy’ way, but like Dimaline couldn’t quite figure out what that kind of power means in practical terms, what claiming or reclaiming it and sharing it looks like. It ended up feeling very hand-waved, and to be honest a whole lot of the narrative seemed to contradict and actively undermine it.

(Like the fact that this entire underground society of witches and their support staff can’t handle one single man…)

As a nonbinary person, I’m always a little wary when someone starts preaching girl-power, because too much of the time it gets conflated with XX chromosomes and biology. So I was relieved when Dimaline included a trans woman amongst the spoon holders – I thought we’d dodged that bullet! But again, it’s messy, and kind of undermined by the repeated emphasis on biological motherhood.

<“Ironic, that, since the only way to truly be immortal is to have descendants.>

I started writing up a whole separate thesis tearing apart VenCo‘s philosophy re women vs men, but you know what? I’m just too Tired. It rubbed me the wrong way and seemed uncomfortably simplistic; let’s leave it at that. (Although I do want to be clear that this isn’t a man-hating book, and we meet several perfectly lovely guys throughout the narrative. But the witches’ actual philosophy seems to be ‘girls only, men are the problem’, and while I’m very happy this book says trans women are real women, there’s a lot of us who aren’t women, and a lot of men who aren’t cishet white men, and in the real world this stuff is really complicated, okay? And VenCo is acting like it isn’t. Which I do not love.)

I do want to take a sec to talk about the spoons themselves, though. I thought the idea of seven prophesised spoons was just the right mix of whimsical and magical – it was a big part of why I picked up VenCo in the first place! But I was really unhappy with the backstory of the spoons, and the obsession with Salem, Massachusetts. We discover that the spoons were created by a misogynistic Puritan man in Salem, part of a series of decorative spoons that were intended to ‘keep women in their place’, to remind them not to go near magic. And they did this by…being engraved with witches riding brooms? Sorry, I don’t get how that’s supposed to work? At all??? You buy one of these as a souvenir of your trip to Salem, presumably hang it in your kitchen after, and…your wife doesn’t get uppity? What? It’s a spoon, dude. It’s really not an inherently intimidating object, and it definitely doesn’t scream ONLY MEN CAN HAVE POWER. It’s not like an ancient Roman tintinnabulum or something!

I’m not sure if this is an objectively a poor writing choice or just an instance of my personal taste not matching up with the author’s; I wanted the spoons to be…well, Not This. Pretty? Witchy? Silly? I thought it would be a slightly tongue-in-cheek thing, that the characters would acknowledge that this is an extremely odd way of finding chosen ones but what’re you gonna do??? And we didn’t get that. Just a lot of emphasis on and reminders of, over and over, the ugly-hag imagery etched into the spoons, without any real explanation of how that imagery was meaningful.

(Plus there’s the whole thing re the spoons coming from Salem. Where the present-day coven also resides, and like. Can we not? Can we drop the obsession with Salem? I’m so sick and tired of people dropping the witches in their stories in Salem. It’s just boring and lazy at this point.)

If I’m being generous, I can guardedly admit that it might be intended as a reclaiming of the witch-riding-a-broom imagery, a subversion of an attempt to strip women of power (but…with spoons??? HOW DO SPOONS INTIMIDATE ANYONE?), taking these objects that were supposed to keep women down (…somehow) and turn them into objects of power instead. But a) they’re not objects of power, we really just have to trust the text that these spoons are special, because we definitely never see it for ourselves, and b) there were so many other ways you could have played with this! Why not use or invent some analogue of Welsh love spoons, which have their own language of symbols – then you could have done all sorts of things with the symbols in each spoon? Why not have a mismatched set of spoons, where each one once belonged to a woman executed for witchcraft? That way they become a bridge between the past and the present, connecting the witches of today to the witches of yesteryear; the metaphor of passing the torch, except the torch is a spoon? With that you could have leaned into how the spoon is traditionally a very feminine thing, especially if we’re talking about cooking and mixing spoons women would have used in the kitchen, you know? THAT would have felt like a reclaiming, a subversion of these traditionally womanly objects. Any of that would have been more interesting and fun than what Dimaline actually did, and I came up with those ideas in less than ten minutes.

Instead, Salem and very weird misogyny. Lame.

I did appreciate that Dimaline included several different real-life magical traditions in the book, and nods to more, but it’s bizarre to me how little magic we actually see, and there’s no discussions or explanations of how it works or what it’s capable of. Later, we’re told that being a witch is actually something you either are or you aren’t – you can’t learn it, and the children of witches who do not themselves inherit whatever it is that makes you a witch become witch-adjacent support staff instead, and hi, I absolutely hate this worldbuilding.

<“Do you know what happens when a witch has children who don’t inherit her power?”

…

“They become Watchers, like me,” the Mother continued, pointing to herself. Then she indicated the Crone. “Or Bookers.” Then, finally, the Maiden. “Or Tenders,>

It’s also extremely confusing; the idea that being a witch is tied to your genes, or something, is…what??? Magic is genetic??? Doesn’t that completely contradict the idea that magic belongs to the Othered, that to be Othered (aka, femme, not-white, and/or queer) is to be inherently magical? Which seems to be what parts of the book are trying to say?

And, uh. For a supposedly massively powerful, magical organisation, Venco the corporation might as well not exist for all the relevance it has to the story here. There is a kind of underground community that helps support witches, but we don’t see Venco employees or operatives pulling strings and making things happen for our characters, not even in purely mundane ways like covering the price of gas and plane tickets for Lucky. Why on earth is the book named for this company???

Maybe it’s not – since ‘venco’ is an amalgam of ‘coven’, maybe the title is supposed to refer to The Coven – aka, Lucky’s coven – coming together. Except that, as previously stated, the coven is pretty useless and unimpressive, so???

Argh.

The Oracle do try to push or direct magical power at the coven at one point, but it’s all very useless and handwavey, and look, I do not need (or want) a magic system that is all laid out like a Maths equation, I love magic that is mysterious and wondrous and, well, magical. But it’s not, here. There’s no sense of wonder connected to the magic of this story; there are no moments that sent happy chills down my spine or gave me electric goosebumps. The magic is…vague, and diffuse, and barely present. Not in a dreamlike way, but in an I can’t commit to what the magic in my story can do so I’m going to use it as little as possible way. It was so frustrating, especially in a book that claimed it was all about women and minorities discovering, reclaiming and wielding magical power!

Because it isn’t. It really isn’t. If it was, we would see the other witches take a more active role. We would see the villain hindered by their spells and cleverness. We would see magic smoothing the way for Lucky, getting her out of difficult situations, allowing her to accomplish what couldn’t be accomplished otherwise. And there’s none of that.

Lucky herself? Wonderful. Stella, her grandmother? Epic. Their relationship? *chef’s kiss*

<“Kids look good on you,” Stella baited Lucky as she followed along.

“And sanity looks good on you,” Lucky teased back, “but some things are just borrowed.”>

I even loved the full cast of secondary characters, the holders of the other spoons, but it’s like Dimaline had no idea what to do with them, because, again, they just spend the whole book shoved into a house, cowering from the monster, doing almost nothing. None of them get to be anything but extremely passive.

(Why not have each of the witches come from/join/learn a different magical tradition, so they’re all working different kinds of witchcraft/magic? Why not have them using chaos magic, creating their own spells and sigils and rituals, reinventing magic the way they’re supposed to be reinventing the world? THERE WAS SO MUCH YOU COULD HAVE DONE HERE!)

And while I don’t want to go into spoilers, the showdown between Lucky and the bad guy is a trainwreck – don’t get me started on the bondage gear – and the reveal of the final spoon-holder? It was so obvious and cliche that I almost cried. Heartbreakingly disappointing, straight into cliche.

The prose itself is gorgeous, and I will definitely be looking at Dimaline’s other books, both those she’s previously published and any she publishes in the future, simply because of how beautiful her writing is. But if what you want is a modern, intersectional witchy+femme manifesto-story, then I point you instead towards The Women Could Fly, which is exquisitely excellent.

Because VenCo absolutely fails at it.

There's an international secret society of witches hiding in plain sight - working in the publishing branch of VenCo, run by the Mother, the Maiden, and the Crone.

Seven witches need to be brought together to form a strong coven. Five have been found, and the clock is ticking. Witch six is Lucky - kinda like when you call a tall man "Tiny" - but that's her name; unfortunately, it's not her experience. Lucky finds a strange spoon marked with a witch just as she and her grandmother, Stella, are about to be evicted from their apartment in Toronto

What follows is an amazing road trip as Lucky and Stella drive from Toronto to Salem and other places unmentionable due to spoilers, trying desperately to find the final spoon, and equally importantly, the seventh witch, as the last of the Benandanti chase after them

Found family, resisting the patriarchy, living your full life, indigenous author, indigenous MC, LGBTQIA+ supporting characters, road trip, witchcraft from various regions of the US

Super awesome book. I hope there is a sequel or six!

advanced-reader-copy, adventure, alcoholism, Boston, business, California, children, contemporary, diversity, easy-reading, dysfunctional-families, family, fantasy, feel-good, feminism, fiction, inspirational-spiritual, magic, magical-realism, Massachusetts, mental-health, multiple-time-periods, mystery, paranormal, relationships, relationships-business, relationships-children, relationships-family, relationships-friendship, road-trip, series, witches, women, women’s-fiction, women-sleuths

Do you wish you had any special powers?

That would be so fun! I really think that certain herbs and spices are great at healing ailments and I think that is such an interesting thing to know. While I know that isn’t exactly witchcraft it used to be right up there with it.

One day you will find a silver spoon. Shortly thereafter you will be found by VenCo and brought into the coven. It will happy when you don’t expect it, and it will feel random when you find it. VenCo needs all seven spoons to be found for their coven to be complete. When Lucky is found with spoon number six, they all rush to find the seventh spoon and on the way Lucky learns more about her family than she ever thought possible.

This was an interesting read. I went into it expecting a witch who came into her powers when she found her coven and I expected an exploration into that. That is not what happened here. This book ultimately did fall flat for me but there are parts and things I enjoyed, making it a solid middle of the road read. My biggest complaint is that I wish there was more magic, this is focused on the witches and their journey, not so much the magic that I was hoping for. I found this book to be very atmospheric and descriptive, which aren’t inherently bad, its just something that I struggle holding my attention. Because of this, I did find this one boring. However, this one is recommended to those who enjoyed Alice Hoffmans Practical Magic.


Thank you to @netgalley, and the publisher, @williammorrowbooks and @customhousebooks for my e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. Out February 7th!

Adding all things Cherie Dimaline to my 2023 TBR. I loved reading this book!

Witches are really having their moment right now (and it feels like I’ve read all of the witchy books of 2021 and beyond), but this was a really unique and interesting story about a young witch who comes into her own. Lucky St. James hasn’t been very lucky at all. That all changes when she discovers what is seemingly a piece of junk in her building’s basement - a small souvenir spoon with a witch and the word SALEM on it. Lucky is recruited by the women of VenCo and tasked with finding the next witch, the one who will complete their coven and help save the world. But time isn’t on Lucky’s side and she only has nine days to find the witch, all while the murderous Benandanti hunts her down.

VenCo is very much a story about family, both given and found. It is character driven, so if you’re looking for something with lots of action and high magic this may not be the book for you. I loved the found family of the VenCo witches and how we got to see each flashbacks of each witch finding their spoon. Their stories were all unique and at the same time they share trauma at the hands of the men in their lives. Hex the patriarchy indeed.

The road trip Lucky and her grandmother embark on is lots of fun and included even more memorable characters along the way. My only kind of complaint is that the pacing was a bit off at times and because of that the ending seemed a bit rushed.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and William Morrow for an advance copy.

Witchy fantasy from Cherie Dimaline? Yes please!
I loved the bringing together of 7 witches and their back stories and the interwoven connections.
But overall Lucky and her grandmother’s relationship was the star.
I’m so grateful I got to read an eARC of this.
Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins.

"For fans of The Once and Future Witches and Practical Magic, comes an incredibly imaginative, highly anticipated new novel featuring witches, magic, and a road trip across America - from Cherie Dimaline, the critically acclaimed author of Empire of Wild.

Métis millennial Lucky St. James is barely hanging on when she learns she'll be evicted from the tiny Toronto apartment she shares with her cantankerous but loving grandmother Stella. But then one night, something strange and irresistible calls out to Lucky. She burrows through a wall to find a tarnished silver spoon, humming with otherworldly energy, etched with a crooked-nosed witch and the word SALEM.

Lucky is familiar with the magic of her indigenous ancestors, but she has no idea that the spoon connects her to a teeming network of witches across North America who have anxiously awaited her discovery.

Enter VenCo, a front company fueled by vast resources of dark money (its name is an anagram of "coven.") VenCo's witches hide in plain sight wherever women gather: Tupperware parties, Mommy and Me classes, suburban book clubs. Since colonial times, they have awaited the moment the seven spoons will come together and ignite a new era, returning women to their rightful power.

But as reckoning approaches, a very powerful adversary is stalking their every move. He's Jay Christos, a roguish and deadly witch-hunter as old as witchcraft itself.

To find the last spoon, Lucky and Stella embark on a rollicking and dangerous road trip to the darkly magical city of New Orleans, where the final showdown will determine whether VenCo will usher in a new beginning…or remain underground forever.

A wildly imaginative and compulsively readable fantasia of adventure, history, Americana, feminism, and magic, VenCo is a novel only the supremely gifted Cherie Dimaline could write."

Dammit, I knew my book club could be something more!

This novel follows a young Métis woman, struggling to make ends meet while caring for her grandmother. She finds a spoon in the basement of her building, which leads her to a forming coven of witches—but first they must find the seventh witch. The plotting and pace of this was a bit off for me, with a lot of threads dropped, but I liked the characters and ideas. It was more like a 3.5 for me.

I didn't think I would like this after reading the first few pages. Not my reading taste at all, Not even sure how I obtained it. At first I found the language of the main character grating. I decided to keep at it anyway and so glad I did. Cherie Dimaline writing is magical. The writing is what kept me...the plot is what had me up until 2am to finish. Despite my very first trepidation, ended up being a 4star. Well worth your time!
Book due to come out February 7, 2023

I finished this today, and I enjoyed the book. Everything I've read by this author has been great. I'm holding off on posting the full review until the strike is over.

An interesting book to review. There were parts that really landed, and parts that felt just kind of there. Loved the women and the witches and all the interesting little ways that magic infuses this book, but I was less interested by the otherall plot. Perhaps it was a wrong book, wrong time situation, but I just cou'dn't concentrate on it. I may give it a reread later in the year and see if my opinions change.

DNF@ 56%
I liked the premise of this book,.but that's about it. Nothing was happening and it was boring. I didn't like the writing either.

Thank you again to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for an ARC of VenCo.

Lucky hasn’t felt she lives up to her name- after losing her mother years ago and on the verge of losing her apartment, she’s feeling lost and worried for what will come next for her and her grandmother. Then her whole world is turned upside down and she’s on a drive across the country for some answers.

Truth be told, I didn’t dislike this book. There was casual representation of marginalised groups that didn’t feel forced and was natural. But I don’t know if this eventual series will be for me. I sense some leanings toward sexual content and while I know that’s some people’s cup of tea, it’s unfortunately not really mine. I ended up just skimming through parts with some characters because of it.

Call me a prude, it’s fine, but my partner will disagree with you.

Lucky St. James is just trying to keep herself and her grandmother (who has dementia) fed, sheltered, and safe in Toronto when she is pulled into a centuries-old conflict between witches and the men who hunt them down in Cherie Dimaline’s tense novel, VenCo. We never really learn a lot about this world’s explanation for witch-hunting, which is a little frustrating, nor do we get much more than a series of backstories about the members of the coven Lucky is fated to join. The best parts of this book are the sections focused on Lucky herself, who stands out in an otherwise thin story.

Lucky has lived on the thin boundary between poverty and absolute penury for most of her life. Her mother, who had a knack for making magic out of nothing, taught Lucky everything she knew about survival before dying of cancer when Lucky was very young. When we meet her, Lucky makes ends meet with temp work and struggles to make sure that her grandmother is safe. Unfortunately for the duo, Lucky has just received word that she and her grandmother are going to be evicted. The sudden offer of a job in Salem, Massachusetts, delivered by a woman who is clearly not telling Lucky everything, is the kind of offer Lucky can’t turn down.

Once Lucky is introduced to the world of the Salem coven and its guiding organization, VenCo, things get a lot more interesting. Lucky and her new cohorts have to find the last member of their coven, to fulfill the hope that they will somehow (?) make the world a better place. The only thing standing their way is an immortal witch hunter, whose chapters absolutely made my skin crawl as this creature describes using everyone around him for his own advantage or pleasure.

The climax of VenCo is outstanding and may be worth the price of admission for fans of original witchy fiction. My biggest problem with VenCo is that, in spite of some really good characterization and magical combat, it races along so fast that we never get to settle into the other characters or how magic works or what VenCo and the Maiden, Mother, and Crone and its helm are really for. I feel like the plot and cast list should’ve been scaled back or expanded greatly so that all of the characters have more development and so that we can see further behind the scenes.

A witchy book that is intersectional, intergenerational and meant for marginalized people? Sign me up. It tackles feminism and social issues and trauma all while drawing you into the world of them with the raw and suspenseful writing of the author. So in love.

“Mothers are the witches we know best but never acknowledge.” ❤️
VenCo is about the power women have when we join forces. Lucky St. James is living with her elderly grandmother but they’re about to be evicted when she finds an old, mysterious spoon. The spoon is one of 7 and it connects Lucky with a group of witches that have been waiting for the 7 spoons to finally come together and restore witches to their rightful power. There’s a race against time to locate the final spoon and it’s witch, a dangerous road trip and an immortal witch hunter determined to stop them. Suspenseful and funny, I laughed out loud at parts and fell completely in love with these fierce witches. Highly recommend!

A hidden power unlike any other rests at the soul of this novel. The storytelling is engaging, the characters easy to like. The plot wavers as if it is one of the characters, a little lost and trying to finds its way. Overall a good read but I don't know that it makes me want to read more if this indeed a series as the ending makes it seem. 3.5

This wasn't what I expected at all from the blurb, which spoke of adventure and mystery and thrills - none of which I found as far as I read... What I found was a Millennial who was down on her luck (yes, a pun - I couldn't help it) and once again the whole world seems to be against the poor beleaguered youngster- which is a theme I seem to be encountering more and more lately, and which I must confess to find wearying.

The setup was all right, but paired with the blurb it led me to imagine a much more complex amount of world building than I found. Admittedly I did not finish this one (I found myself turning pages just to increase the percentage read, at which point I knew this just wasn't a good fit for me and decided to give up) but it felt more like a journey of self discovery novel than a thrilling adventure, and the latter is what I was expecting - and looking for.

There wasn't anything wrong with it. I did find the characters a little bit flat, and in a book with such a clever construct I would have expected a lot more world building (or at least stage-setting) up front, but I think my biggest issue was that I went in expecting one thing and received another. I really think the blurb did this one a disservice as far as I'm concerned, and it just wasn't a good fit for me.

I really, really liked this one, A fun read. Magic, a good villain, female relationships, Canadian content (I lived in Toronto so I loved seeing the city through Lucky’s eyes!) Would 100% read a spin off about the mysterious maiden, mother and crone of VenCo…

I will, unfortunately, be withholding my review until a fair contract agreement is reached with the HarperCollins Union.