Godshot
Author: Chelsea Bieker
Publisher: Catapult
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for.
Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mice collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules, and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother, no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.
Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.
TL;DR Review
Godshot has it all: beautiful writing, tons of emotions, a cult, and big round characters. I highly recommend.
For you if: You want a cult story, but make it literary fiction.
Full Review
Big thanks to Catapult and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy of this book. It was originally supposed to be published on April 7, but the pub date got pushed up to March 31!
“People are one way, you think. You watch them every day and you think you know what they’re capable of. That’s how I felt about your mother. I felt I knew just what she would do in any situation. But that’s always wrong. You never really know what any one person will do, or has done.”
Godshot is Chelsea Bieker’s debut novel, and WHAT a debut. It’s about a 14-year-old girl named Lacey May who lives in Peaches, California — once a major producer of raisins, now a ghost town plagued by drought. Lacey and her mother left behind her mother’s string of no-good ex-boyfriends to join the local church, which is really a cult led by Pastor Vern. The members of the church saw him “bring rain” once before and now believe that he will save them all, if only they are obedient enough. But then Lacey’s mom takes off and Vern’s terrible plan for Lacey and the other young girls of the church (see trigger warnings below) comes to light, and Lacey can’t just blindly follow anymore.
The whole book is told from Lacey’s first person POV, and this is its great delight. Lacey’s voice is strong, and her growth unfolds before us in both action and words. Her powers of observation and reflection are astute. I felt like I was simultaneously crying for her and cheering for her the whole time. Bieker’s writing is just so powerful and resonant!
The story begins as a sort of slow burn, but as Lacey puts more and more of the pieces together it starts to swirl around, until it hits a fast-paced, page-turning conclusion. And here are some of the great things we get to explore along the way: womanhood, motherhood, patriarchy, power, abuse, love, friendship, coming of age, phone sex, witches, family, religion, hunger, pain, and beauty.
Ultimately, this is a book about the resilience of women and the force of their relationships — with one another and with themselves. It’s about the power of powerful men to direct women’s lives, and the power of powerful women pushing back. It’s about what you can live with and what you can’t. Who your born family is and who your chosen family is. How you grow into your own person out of the ashes of other people’s mistreatment.
Trigger Warnings
Rape of a minor
Pregnancy or childbirth
Domestic abuse
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