Lacey May leads an uncommon life. At only 14 years old, she is blindly faithful to the teachings of Pastor Vern, head of a religious cult in small-town Peaches, California. The land is plagued with drought but she has no fear, for Pastor Vern will surely bring rain as he has once before, just as long as the community keeps their faith. After all, he claims to be the equal of Jesus. A saviour who rains “God glitter” down upon the congregation as a tacky symbol of his power and infinite holiness. While waiting for the rain to come, however, his people will continue to be tested, punished for their sins, and Lacey has accepted this as their way of life.
When her alcoholic mother is banished from the community after making the last in a series of poor choices, Lacey May is forced to live with her grandmother, Cherry, who really isn’t any more stable. (Just consider Cherry’s collection of taxidermy rodents, which she appears to have more attachment to than Lacey May, for example. Or the way she forces Lacey May to wait on her hand and foot, cleaning fly larvae from the walls and feeding her by hand.) As Pastor Vern unfurls his latest plan to save the community and end the drought, asking his followers to “step over the lines of our comfort,” Lacey May starts to question what she has been led to believe. Ultimately shedding her innocence, her concepts of right and wrong shattered, she begins to see things for what they really are … but is this awakening enough? Can she actually do anything about her situation? And will she ever be able to find her mother?
In Godshot, Bieker delivers an utterly captivating, driving plot alongside unforgettable characters and incisive prose. She explores the ever-fascinating and puzzling subject of life inside a religious cult in a fresh, tender way. Bieker’s words are alluring and beautifully-wrought, crisp and straight-forward while also steeped in emotion. Beneath the gripping storyline of Lacey May’s life under the leadership of Pastor Vern lie the obvious themes of religion and faith, a questioning and probing of the similarities and differences between the two. Furthermore, Bieker digs in to examine the complex themes of power and control, specifically with regard to the agency (or, all too often, the lack thereof) of women.
The reader becomes completely entwined not only in Lacey’s journey through adolescence — which is difficult enough on its own as a young woman searches for confidence, a sense of self, and one’s place in the world — but also through a uniquely traumatic upbringing. Bieker delicately yet fearlessly broaches issues of dysfunctional family relationships, the innate desire to be loved, the undying love children hold for their parents in even the most inconceivable circumstances, and how true friends can become the family you never had. She explores how the line between good and bad, right and wrong, can become blurred before one even realises it has happened.
Godshot, much like its stunning cover, is a sparkling wonder of a debut novel that tugs fiercely at the heartstrings. Lacey May’s story, despite her loneliness and perhaps because of her imperfections, etches a compelling picture of resilience housed in an uncommon vessel. I highly recommend this one … it’s bound to be one of the best books of 2020, certainly with one of the most memorable protagonists!
Godshot is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers. Many thanks to Catapult for providing a finished copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among others. She has been awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel.
Will you be picking up Godshot? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
“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.
