VenCo
A Novel
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4.1 • 15 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
"Once I opened VenCo, I was propelled through an entire night of charmed reading. Cherie Dimaline creates a world utterly fantastical, yet real. VenCo is funny, tense, and cracking with a dark, divine energy." ---Louise Erdrich, New York Times bestselling author of The Sentence
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 & 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.
“Crackling with magic, mystery, adventure, and intrigue, VenCo is a captivating tribute to the bonds of families we are born into and the ones that we create, and a delightful testament to the power of all womankind.”— Nikki Erlick, New York Times bestselling author of The Measure
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dimaline (Empire of Wild) underwhelms in this clunky feminist fantasy. Half-Métis Torontonian Lucky St. James is an underemployed, burned-out caregiver to her grandmother Stella. Then she finds a magical spoon, discovers she's a witch, and moves to Salem with Stella to join a fledgling coven. The coven will usher in a new era—but only if all seven magical spoons in existence can be found by other unknowing witches like Lucky before the Benandanti, a group of misogynist witch hunters, can find them first. Dimaline's trans-inclusive, BIPOC cast is admirable, but she works in their perspectives in the clunkiest way possible, interrupting the narrative at odd moments to give nearly every supporting character a POV section used to convey unwieldy backstory and describe prophetic dreams. Though this aspires to be literary fantasy—and indeed Dimaline's prose is strong—the plot feels oddly like a mid-'90s girl power YA fantasy and offers frustratingly shallow readings of both historical events and contemporary power structures. The main villain falls particularly flat: a member of the Benandanti pointedly named Jay Christos, who's only ever shown negging, sexually assaulting, and/or murdering everyone he meets; he's more cardboard cutout than character. All but Dimaline's most devoted fans can skip this one.
