VenCo by Cherie Dimaline (Review by Stephanie Rowitz)

Rating: 3/5

Lucky St. James has never considered herself lucky, despite what her name may imply, until she discovers her destiny of being in a coven of witches called VenCo. The five witches of VenCo hide in plain sight in the modern world as they work on elevating women’s statuses in all arenas of power. All they need is to find the last two witches destined for their coven to create a new era, one where women are finally the ones in charge.

However, with every great vigilante team lurks a villain. In this case, that’s Jay Christos, an immortal who’s been hunting witches since the Salem witch trials. Christos may be the last of his kind, but he is hellbent on eradicating all witches from the earth before they unite and become more powerful than anything the world has ever seen before.

I really liked the concept of this book and the idea of witchiness being linked to women’s intuition. I also liked how the author balanced ideas of mysticism, witchiness, and Indigenous knowledge to show how powerful magic can be when all of those elements are blended together.

However, I felt like the author was trying to do too much in this book. There’s world building, a quest, a woman struggling to accept her new identity, and the omniscient view into several different characters’ minds as they embark on the quest. I felt that if this book focused more on just a couple of these elements (i.e., the rules of the witchy world and Lucky’s newfound identity) and explored them more in-depth, it would’ve been a richer story. It sort of reads like a movie with several jumps from scene-to-scene and mind-to-mind, but doesn’t quite dwell long enough in any of them.

It’s still a fun read and I hope there’s a sequel to VenCo to see how the seven witches’ stories play out. I’m definitely intrigued enough to want to read the next book should there be another installment.