Review: Godshot by Chelsea Bieker

Godshot by Chelsea Bieker

Blurb from Goodreads:

"Chelsea Bieker's Godshot is an absolute masterpiece. A truly epic journey through girlhood, divinity, and the blood that binds and divides us, it is a feminist magnum opus of this, or any, time. Bieker is a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity. 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 . . . Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed." ―T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

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.

My Review:
It has been a long time since I reviewed a five star book but I had no hesitation rating this book as high I can.  This book is horrifying but also just feels so true.  The setting was immaculately described, the world building (although not a fantasy) perfect -- it feels like a dystopian but one that could happy tomorrow.  I have no criticisms of this book and I cannot wait for more from this author.  I believe she is coming out with a short story collection soon and I will read it as soon as I can!

I highly recommend this to fans of literary fiction!  At times, I was reminded of both Claire Vaye Watkins and Christopher McCormick if only because of the central valley descriptions.  This one is so good, you will devour it!  Godshot comes out next week on April 7, 2020, you can purchase HERE, and I hope you consider reading this one!

That spring Pastor Vern decided we were due for a congregation-wide revival. We filled an abandoned bathtub behind the church with liters of Check Mate Cola and one by one he held us under just long enough for the lungs to burn, for fearful desperation to set in, and we came up gasping and sticky, his face the first face we saw, a God to us. Our tongues darted to catch the sugar drops falling from our brows. How we cheered as the sugar dried on our skin under the ruthless burn of the sun. There was no wasting water, and so the soda would do. It was such a small sacrifice, to use soda instead of water, that I almost mistook it for a thrill.