Cherie Dimaline

An incredibly inventive, highly anticipated second adult novel--with witches, magic, and a road trip through 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.

A Novel

VenCo

Suzie

Anxiety makes everything feel very big or very small, depending on which is more hurtful in the moment 

Lindsay

Witches were never capitalists. We were the thing that stood in the way of capitalism, which is just the engine of the patriarchy, after all.

Guilt has a way of showing up when it is least useful and settling in so that it’s hard to breathe.

Anxiety makes everything feel very big or very small, depending on which is more hurtful in the moment.

She made you who you are. Gave you magic. Gave you guts. Mothers are the witches we know best but never acknowledge.

Throughout history, witches have been the stand-ins for all people who have felt “outside” or “different.” I say, fuck it—go outside, be different, be so different they have to loosen their grip on the world because you are proof there is so much beyond them. Live fully, feel it all without apology, be weird and powerful and amazing. Because ultimately, that is who this book was written for—the wild witches that no man (and no system) could ever begin to contain.

 closing, I would like to remind you that it’s always a good day to hex the patriarchy.

VenCo quotes

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