Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the ARC.
This is the first book by Cherie Dimaline that I've read, and I really enjoyed it. It has a varied and diverse cast of characters in a modern witchcraft tale. The strength of it to me lies in the relationships between the characters and how they came to form a found family... and why. I also enjoyed the "road trip" aspect of it, exploring so many different locations in north america. A lot of it was told in the form of flashbacks, which is not always my favourite form of storytelling but in this case it worked, although at times it feels like there is a lot more story than is currently shared, particularly with regards to Lucky's mother. It feels like the start of a series and I would read more!

This book was such a fun read once I got into it. I stayed up super late to finish reading because I just had to know what happened. I loved the diversity and inclusiveness and I loved getting to 'go' to different places. This will be a great book club book.

First of all, the COVER of VenCo is absolutely stunning! Honestly, if I knew nothing about the book or author I'd buy this book just on the gorgeous cover.

Second, Cherie Dimaline is a natural story teller. This is now the third book I've read by her, and it seems like I love them more as I go along. Her attention to detail is exquisite, and because of this everything I read appears to be so vivid in my mind. Every character, every place (no matter how dark or vibrant), is so clearly defined.

I'm not a big reader of witches or new age, but this book pulled me in. I tell you, this is another great book by Cherie Dimaline.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

There is nothing better than a really good witchy story, and this one certainly hit the mark! A writer who sticks to one genre and writes those books well is talented, but a writer who can create in different genres truly has a gift. VenCo is very different from Cherie Dimaline’s YA dystopian novels, which I loved, yet it still kept me spellbound from start to finish. It was so nice to see these women who were all lost or struggling in their lives come together and truly find a family where they could all count on each other. Women who bond together over a common purpose are indestructible! The characters were all unique and interesting, and Stella was an absolute hoot. This is a story of witches and magic, but it is even more so a story about relationships, family, the power of women, and love in any form. I found myself rooting hard for Lucky in her search for the last witch to complete the coven before it was too late because I wanted her to finally find happiness and stability in her life. I really hope Cherie is planning a sequel to this book.

A great new work by Cherie Dimaline! This is a story about witches, but more so, about women, about mothers and daughters, about connections with those who came before, and about power. I loved getting to know Lucky, Stella, and all the women of the coven, as well as Arnya through Lucky’s memories. Based on the epilogue, I hope to meet them again as their story continues.

Cherie Dimaline's writing is fantastic, but I have to say her latest - the just released VenCo - is brilliant!

Lucky St. James and her Grandmother Stella are living hand to mouth in a Toronto apartment when they're served an eviction notice. When Lucky finds a small spoon with the word SALEM and the image of a hag stamped on it, their fortunes seem to be looking up. Lucky is offered an interview at VenCo in the US, so it's a road trip for Lucky and Stella.

The discovery of this spoon is tracked by Meena - a powerful witch in Salem. The spoon has found it's owner, (although she doesn't know it), and after hundreds of years, there are now six witches with spoons. The seventh is all that is needed for the coven to be complete...

Oh, there's so much to love in this tale. Certainly the characters - they're a diverse group with distinct personalities, skills and mindsets. It was easy to paint mental images of every woman as they are all offered a chance to introduce themselves. But the stand out character for me was Gramma Stella. She has and still is, living life on her terms despite what life has dealt to her. She made me by turns laugh and cry.

And yes, you're right - the hunt is now on for that seventh spoon and witch. The search is intense, with many skills, tactics - and magic, coming into play. Even more worrisome is the person who wants that seventh spoon as well - for very different reasons.

VenCo is a spellbinding tale that blends suspense, magic, history, and truths. I was caught up in book from first page to last. And as the last page was turned, I stopped and thought - 'just maybe'..

A novel with a unique plot and a diverse cast of characters full of powerful women. I really liked the flashback scenes from Lucky's childhood, it was a nice glimpse into her past, and I really liked the idea of the story.
Unfortunately though, I didn't finish the book. I couldn't get through it. There were too many point of view jumps and the pacing was a little slow for me.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC.

I loved this! My next read (from this author) will be "The Marrow Thieves" simply because it's already sitting on my shelf. This was such a good book!

When I hear the words Indigenous and witches, I am intrigued!! This story is about a bunch of powerful women who have to come together to complete a mission on a VERY tight deadline.

I absolutely loved our main characters, namely Lucky and Stella because they were so complex and dynamic! I loved seeing their interactions and how they worked through their problems together.

This book is definitely what I consider to be a slow burn, but the characters are so fascinating that I didn’t mind. There isn’t too much lore and the lore that is described isn’t too complicated to follow, which I love. The world building is amazing and fairly easy to follow and grasp.

The settings were all super cool, gotta love a magical road trip! The contrast between locations were really apparent and added a lot to the characters found at each one.

There isn’t much romance, however there is a sapphic couple who is adorable! Some sexual content, but not much and definitely not smutty.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I cannot wait to see more Indigenous authors jump into other writing genres! Indigenizing all genres is something I would love to happen and Dimaline is well on her way!

Just when Lucky St. James’s luck (😏) is starting to run out. She comes across an old spoon with the word SALEM on it.
In Salem a coven of witches have been working to reconnect the spoons. And unite the special witches who hold them. In doing so they hope to bring about a new world order.

I was so excited to start this book. It started off strong but slowed right down.
There were a lot of words and not a lot of substance and I found it to be a rather unenjoyable read.
I can see why some people would love this one, but it wasn’t for me.

Lucky St James is unhappy and dissatisfied with her life. She finds and is drawn to a silver spoon in a tunnel running under the apartment where she lives with her grandmother Stella. Strangely, the spoon is engraved with a stereotypical image of a witch, six pins and the word .’Salem’. Shortly afterwards, Lucky is approached by a Meena Good from Salem and offered a job. Meena is a powerful witch who works for VenCo, a company which helps women and puts them in areas of influence. Feeling as if her life is looking up, Lucky decides to accept, takes her grandmother and drives to Salem. Once there, Lucky meets Meena and four other women, learns that she is a witch and that she must now find the seventh witch to complete their coven. She has only 9 days to find the next witch and seventh spoon, to evade a dangerous witch hunter and to return to Salem. Only then can the coven be complete and restore women to their rightful power. Will she be able to complete this quest safely and in time?

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and did not want to put it down. It is well and cleverly written, depicts a modern view of witches, and has themes of feminism, strength and confidence building, and the importance of women’s relationships.. I would highly recommend it and look forward to a sequel.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

VenCo is a story of found family, connections and individual everyday magic with a contemporary take on witches. The pacing is on the slower side, but the story steadily builds on the urban fantasy world and to the climax.⁠
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The ladies of the coven are diverse and there is a great emphasis on them individually sharing their stories. I loved the relationship between Lucky and grandmother Stella during their travels.⁠
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The ending is fabulous and I hope their is a sequel or some sort of continuation of the world.⁠

CW: death, violence, dementia, misogyny, death of parent, alcohol, ableism, deadnaming, transphobia, cancer, SA, colonization

Cherie Dimaline does it again, what a story. She created a group of women and just sucked me into their lives. We learned how powerful women can be when they work together and also what happens when people are scared of that power. Give this a read if you haven't already. Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the ARC.

Overall: 4.5/5 but rounded down to 4

I’m a fan of Cherie Dimaline and the concepts of her novels always excite me. I have been disappointed in the execution in the past, but this is her best work yet, I think. It’s fun, entertaining, and the characters are fleshed out enough to have you care for them.

The premise, a reuniting of a coven of North American witches, sets the stage for an adventure that takes the protagonist, Lucky, from Toronto across the US toting her grandma (the best character in the book) along with her.

The villain is, at times, formidable and extremely creepy. So that makes the stakes feel high. The writing is irreverent and snarky, a tone that fits well with the novel overall. I love how different witch-lores are explored and woven into the story.

The only quibble I have is that sometimes it feels like decisions were made by characters simply to progress the plot rather than by any logic to the situation at hand.

A good read. Fun and quick and cute.

VenCo!
I love Chérie’s style of writing. It is beautifully descriptive which creates a highly immersive read. Her character development is so rich I swear I knew some of the characters! And speaking of swearing - the author doesn’t shy away from the use of curse words. That’s alright with me - some of my fav words aren’t pg! Their use isn’t vulgar or salacious, rather they speak to Lucky, Stella and the others in a raw and utterly engaging way. It’s as if you are reading it and living it - I can see and hear their voices so clearly. Added to this are the complex and captivating layers for each of the characters - and there are a few. But because it’s done so well you won’t miss a beat. I loved the diversity and Inclusiveness that VenCo held - Indigenous, vast racial and ethnic cultures, and queer and trans representation. This was a powerful story of witches, magical realism, fantasy and so much more. And there is more to come!

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers and the author for my advanced digital copy.

Thank you so much NetGalley and Penguin Random House for access to this AMAZING arc!!

Just wow, it's been so long since I've read a new witchy book, and this is just so fantastic, refreshing, and just so so good! The representation in this is great, the plot was unique and original, and the characters all felt so real and multi-dimensional. The villain was SO ABSOLUTELY HATEABLE. This was just such a good book all around :D

I've had Cherie Dimaline's other books on my TBR for quite some time, and I'm so glad I finally read one. I'm definitely bumping the rest of them higher on my list now!

Delighted to include this title in the February edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction, for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

This book was beautiful and amazing, I loved the story and loved the characters and hated that it ended. The feminism is strong and empowering, the coven is diverse and delightful, and the bad guy was easy to hate. I loved the inclusion of the Crone, The Mother, and The Maiden. Definitely for fans of The Once And Future Witches, I'm hoping there'll be another book.

I really enjoyed this! “VenCo” is a memorable urban fantasy about corporate coven fronts, powerful women, and the everyday magic they carry and share. We follow Lucky St. James, a young Métis woman working temp jobs and struggling to make ends meet, caring for her eccentric grandmother Stella and haunted by memories of her fierce and flighty mother Arnya. One day, Lucky finds an old souvenir spoon with an inscription from Salem, and soon she and Stella are thrown in with a nearly complete coven of witches, racing against time to complete an age-old prophecy and dismantle the patriarchy, hunted all the while by an ancient immortal evil.

The plot was exciting, the writing was strong, the characters intriguing, but I did find the pacing was inconsistent. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I believe it was a purposeful choice; Cherie Dimaline has spoken before about the importance of each character telling their own stories, spinning their own narratives rather than having everything told through the eyes of a protagonist. This dynamic was definitely at play in this novel, as Lucky meets her new coven and hears how they each discovered their Salem spoon at turning points in their lives, effectively creating nesting short stories in the book. I’ve only read one other book by this author, the excellent YA dystopian novel “The Marrow Thieves,” and she does a similar thing while introducing her main players in that book as well. While this is an unusual technique that can interrupt the flow of the plot, it also adds a folkloric feel to her work, strengthening her characters and the reader’s connection to them.

I’d love to live in a world with secret networks of witches, of mothers and tenders and maidens and all kinds of women creating spells to make connections and to protect each other. In some ways, maybe I already do live in that world.

Thanks to Penguin Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I was so excited to reach this book because I LOVED Marrow Thieves. This book had great potential - the story is such a unique idea, the way VenCo and the Oracle are portrayed is so interesting and the characters made me want to know more about them. But at about 25% in it felt like a lot of time was spent world building but I still didn’t really know enough history to build a connection and that continued all the way through. It just felt very surface level and like it could have been so much more.

The speed at which characters drop everything in their personal life for the coven could have been believable, except that not enough time was spent explaining the bonds between the witches. Every time Meena’s character or story was used to provide answers I felt like all I had were more questions. And the dialogue between Stella and Lucky felt almost rushed, like there wasn’t enough time to build that relationship genuinely even though it should have been the most important relationship in the book. I don’t want to leave spoilers but it also felt like a lot of time was spent starting relationships/story lines that were never concluded.

I did love the character of Arnya and thought the flashbacks to Lucky’s childhood were so interesting (I would definitely read a book about Arnya). I love that the author included indigenous characters and made that background such a key part of Lucky’s journey within the coven. The inclusion of a trans character and time spent on building her background was great, and I especially loved that she was welcomed into the coven without a conversation about her being trans. I just really appreciated that her history mattered for her character development, but the characters accepted her without it having to be a political statement - she was simply a witch and part of the coven.

I did enjoy this book and think the story is a really creative and interesting idea but I finished it just wishing it had more.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!