Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend. “Drawn in brilliant, bizarre detail-baptism in warm soda, wisdom from romance novels-Lacey's twin crises of faith and femininity tangle powerfully. It's a timely and disturbing portrait of how easily men can take advantage of vulnerable women-and the consequences sink in more deeply with each page.'-Annabel Gutterman, Time

This is a harrowing tale, which Bieker smartly writes through the lens of a teenager on the cusp of understanding the often fraught relationship between religion and sexuality. 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. 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 mouse 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. Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed.' -T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girlsĭrought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. “Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander crossed with Geek Love or Cruddy, and then add cults, God, motherhood, girlhood, class, deserts, witches, the divinity of women.

Godshot chelsea bieker