Godshot
Chelsea Bieker, 2020
Catapult Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781948226486
Summary
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 mouse 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1988-89 (?)
• Raised—Fresno, California, USA
• Education—B.S., Poly Cal, San Luis Obispo; M.F.A., Portland State University
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon
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 other publications.
She was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel, inspired by her own mother's fleeing an abusive husband, Bieker's father. Read her heart-rending essay in The Paris Review.
Bieker lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and children, where she teaches writing. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend.
Entertainment Weekly
[P]ropulsive, ambitious…. Bieker straddles the line between darkly comic and downright dark, and excels in portraying female friendships…. Bieker’s excellent debut plants themes seen in… The Handmaid’s Tale into a realistic California setting that will linger with readers.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Lacey May’s is an irresistible voice, part gullible believer, part whip-smart independent spirit who surprises at every turn. Debut novelist Bieker weaves in the political battles being fought on multiple fronts.
Library Journal
(Starred review) [A] vivid and cutting exploration of… how mothers shape daughters, biological or otherwise, and how daughters must ultimately learn to mother themselves. Young readers will admire Lacy May’s resilience, moxie, and ability to survive in a world she did not choose.
Booklist
(Starred review) Lacey May is such a strong narrator, at once deeply insightful and painfully naïve, that readers will eagerly want to follow all the threads to the breathless conclusion. A dark, deft first novel about the trauma and resilience of both people and the land they inhabit.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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