The whole book is told from Lacey’s first person POV, and this is its great delight. 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 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. 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. 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. Godshot is Chelsea Bieker’s debut novel, and WHAT a debut. You never really know what any one person will do, or has done.” I felt I knew just what she would do in any situation.
You watch them every day and you think you know what they’re capable of. It was originally supposed to be published on April 7, but the pub date got pushed up to March 31! 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.īig thanks to Catapult and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy of this book. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California.
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