When Powerful Women take to corporate life: VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

You might expect a speculative feminist novel to end with women entering the board room triumphantly. Always willing to confound expectations, this Governor General's Award author starts her ninth book that way. 

Soon we learn that the whole corporation is organized on feminist principles, with a leadership circle rather than a hierarchy. And then it gets into witchcraft. The mission is to find the seventh witch in a prophesied coven before time runs out. We don’t know yet what catastrophe she and her six compatriots are supposed to avert but the sixth witch is now found and clock is definitely ticking.

For a while this book feels and reads like a well written, gently paced, speculative fiction novel featuring the well and thoroughly covered trope of the teenage heroine hunted by an ancient evil. And yet…

It takes a while for the differences to come to the fore. In the traditional hero's journey, the protagonist is forced out of their comfort zone and pushed to take up the quest. In this feminist re-visioning, the heroine's journey, not only are the older witches is part of a circle that is collaborative rather than hierarchical, but they are mutually respectful. At each stage of the increasingly complex situation, they discuss facts and implications, giving each other space. The female characters don’t play into the familiar master and apprentice dynamics. 

 

Of course there's a Big Bad - possibly the last of a centuries-old clan of witch-hunters with mesmeric powers. He's able to spy on the witches through their dreams, and knows when the seventh witch is in their sights.

This author has a firm grasp of language: Its texture, shapes, and flow, like a braided stream, cross and re-cross, forming a tale that is partly well paced contemporary paranormal fantasy, and partly the indigenous underpinnings we have come to expect in a Dimaline novel. Beyond that, the characters bring into harsh light the long-standing western capitalist and religious war on women, from the Reformation-era witch burnings to Salem and beyond in America. Themes of dispossession and identity and belonging breathe from these pages. 

 

Astute readers might note that the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, although human figures forming VenCo's leadership circle, are also archetypes and therefore not fully fleshed out humans with personal histories brought to the fore.

On a purely craft of writing level, I appreciate the ebb and flow of tension. Things get tense and then potentially dangerous, and then things get calmer again and then things get really relaxed and friendly and then Bingo! A quick reminder of danger. It’s all interesting, and the fluidity of the tension is an added piece of my enjoyment.

 

Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity

 

 VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

 

ISBN: 9780063054899
ISBN 10: 0063054892
Imprint: William Morrow
On Sale: February 7, 2023

 

#Indigenous #Witchcraft #Persecution #Salem #Fantasy #Action #Adventure #MagicalRealism #Horror #FairyTales  #FolkTales #Legends #Mythology #OwnVoices #reviewer #bookreview