Review | Cherie Dimaline’s witchy new book ‘VenCo’: a thriller to take down the patriarchy and save the world

For Lucky St. James, the hero of VenCo, the magical new novel from Cherie Dimaline, life seems to be going nowhere. While she dreams of being a writer, she’s stuck in a dead-end temping job, still suffering from the death of her mother more than a decade ago. She lives with her grandmother Stella (whose grip on reality is slipping) in a crappy apartment in Toronto’s East End, from which they are about to be evicted, and pines for romance from her friendship with Malcolm, the multi-tattooed clerk at a video store. It’s not so much a life as it is an existence. Barely.

“Dread, Lucky kept thinking. Nothing ever happens except more of the same.”

Lucky couldn’t be more wrong.

Her life begins to change when she discovers a tarnished spoon in a tunnel off her basement laundry room, a souvenir of Salem, Massachusetts, marked with a witch. It’s not just a souvenir, though: for Lucky, it’s destiny.

The spoon is one of seven, specially crafted and enchanted by a witch generations in the past, part of an elaborate spell to bring together a new coven, which will overturn the patriarchy and, well, save the world. Lucky, with Stella in tow, heads to Salem, where she is taken into the witchy fold and informed that, as per the spell, and despite the fact she has no skills or magical training, it is now up to her to find the seventh and final member of the coven.

Oh, and there’s a deadline. Lucky has mere days to find the last witch, or the spell will be nullified. Forever.

And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a charming, immortal witch hunter in pursuit, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

In case it’s not clear from the description, “VenCo” is an absolute thrill ride of a book, a page-turner of the highest order. It is also, as one would expect from Dimaline, a smart book; as was the case with 2017’s “The Marrow Thieves,” which used a dystopian survival novel to explore Indigenous genocide, and 2019’s “Empire of Wild,” which used a story of the werewolf-like rougarou as a framework for an exploration of grief and faith, “VenCo” is socially, historically, and politically astute.

Early in the book, one of the witches explains, “‘Witches were not all killed by fire. We are the fire. […] The men who took power, they took away access to healing and control over one’s own circumstances — they denounced anyone capable of magic or medicine. Because, if the people believed in magic, something that cannot — by its very nature — be commoditized, they couldn’t get people to buy into their system.’”

Building on this inherent feminism, the story delves deep into witch-lore (it’s difficult to tell how much is historical and how much is fictional) with a wonderfully diverse, queer-friendly, trans-inclusive coven at its core. How casually this inclusiveness is handled is truly refreshing: Lucky, whose mother was Métis, finds a place alongside Salem-born Meena (“an actual descendent of one of the original Salem witches”), her wife Wendy (“Anishinaabe, so more pre-Canada and post-Canada”), Creole single-mother Lettie, and young Freya, who found her spoon near a mini golf course after coming out as trans to her Christian family and claiming her true name. Self-acceptance, relationships, and love are at the core of this novel’s magic: characters draw power from their intimate relationships, their parental defensiveness, their biological families and their chosen clans.

“VenCo” is a powerful and unique reading experience, threaded through with humour and peril. It’s a perfect novel for a winter’s day, because sometimes, our reading life needs a touch of magic.

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