Godshot: A Novel

Written by Chelsea Bieker

Narrated by Lauren Ezzo

"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 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. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781713502296

Chelsea Bieker

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.

Reviews for Godshot

[edward mcnair · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gripping from beginning to end like a roller coaster ride so many ups and downs I loved it

[write5review · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Wisest at 14

In her debut novel, Chelsea Bieker adds another voice calling out men taking advantage of and abusing women, and some women, for personal reasons, being complicit in their treatment. Turns out that smartest kid in the down and out, drought-stricken town of Peaches, CA, is 14-year-old Lacy May, even as she finds herself caught in the whirlwind of bad things happening to her.

Peaches, once a prosperous Central Valley grape growing area and raisin producer, has lost everything due to a persistent drought. What it hasn’t lost and what has proven to be its weakness: Hope. Conmen and grifters know how to exploit such hope born of desperation, especially when combined with an ardent belief in a living and intervening god. Such a con artist, Pastor Vern, has subsumed the town in his version of church and prophet, convincing all that he, and they with their sacrifice and loyalty to him, can implore their god to send down abundant, reinvigorating rain. Through freakish good fortune, he showed up in time to perform a gaudy rain dance of sorts that did seem to result in a downpour early on, with brief effect. Now the townspeople belong to his church, abide by wishes, including forsaking drinking or using water in anyway and submitting to a ritual that turns all of their daughters as young as Lacy into sacrificial lambs, nothing short of the mass rape of these girls by a deluded group of adolescent boys on behalf of the Pastor. Lacy, though powerless to resist, seems to be the only one who appreciates how morally corrupt all this is, apart from a small group of outcast women who operate a phone sex line and offer up salvation as a sideline.

This may sound crazy and not a little repugnant to you, and much in the book will offend many people. However, that appears to be the point: to illustrate how women and young girls fall victim to men and how easily people can be not only duped but inculcated into a belief system that defies all reason, not to mention reality. And how in this state of group mesmerization they can’t escape, even if remaining will destroy them. As fictional as this may seem, readers have only to cast their minds back on religious cults as destructive to human decency and life as Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate, to cite a few of the deadliest.

Reviewers have called this a coming of age novel, and in the sense that a child has to weave her way through a flood of dysfunction, from an alcoholic mother who deserted her on the false hope of stardom and looney grandmother who taxidermies and talks to little rodents, it is. However, the exaggerated writing lends the novel a cartoonish tone that maybe doesn’t serve the subjects very well. That said, however, those not put off by the tone and graphic descriptions of aberrant behavior should find it compelling.

[brookiexlicious · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was hooked by the premise as soon as I read it. This is a book largely about mothers and daughters, but also about religious zealotry, faith, resiliency, and love. This book was a bit of a slow burn at first, but then towards the middle the pacing became more steady. The author writes vividly of the stark landscape; you can see and feel the parched earth, the stark isolation Lacey finds herself in.There are many characters that make up this book, but care is taken to each one. Lacey is naive and smart at the same time; often times I was yelling at her to make another decision or at the horrible ones made by others. There were certain situations occurring where I wished I could physically pluck out the characters from the pages.I do wish there was a bit more to the epilogue in regards to other characters, and I did have some questions about the town itself that went unanswered. Overall this was a gritty yet captivating book, and I look forward to the author’s next work.

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh, my gosh, this is one of the books in the memes that show what your face looks like when you discover the meaning of the title. I hesitate to say too much about this book about a cult religious leader who has a following in a California farming town that used to be known for its raisins. Since the drought, though, everything, even the people have dried up. They were ripe for some charismatic faith healer who has rewritten himself into the Bible, but where he leds them is shocking and I think other readers will be as surprised as I am that a phone sex business owner turns out to have the most morals and care the most for a young pregnant girl.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What I was reading repulsed me but I could not put down Chelsea Bieker's debut novel Godshot. Lacey's narrative voice drew me in, her conflicted nativity and faith struggling to survive as her family and community fails to protect her. The novel reaches into the deepest questions of life and illustrates the limitations of love and faith.The tragic series of events and abuse endured will be hard for some to follow; this is a dark story. But just when it seems that Lacey has lost everything, including control over her own life, she finds salvation.Drought has hit the town of Peaches, the orchards turned to dust. Pastor Vern finds the community ripe for hope and promises to deliver rain if they believe in him. Isolating the community from the world, believers allow him total control.Pastor Vern brings good to some. Lacey's mother found strength to overcome her alcoholism. Pastor Vern also destroys as he wields his total power. His plan to create a perfected church involves assignments, special purposes that believers long to be given. They want to be Godshot. Lacey's mother's assignment takes her on a downward spiral until she abandons Lacey to run off with a man filled with false promises. Lacey is taken in by her grandmother, one of Pastor Vern's unthinking believers. Lacey desperately misses her mother and endeavors to track her down, her search to learn taking her into the world beyond the Godshot.Lacey's assignment begins her journey of doubt. Would God require such things?The novel touches on so many hot-button issues relating to the social status and role of women, the persistence of human hope placed in unreliable leaders, the love of a child for her mother, and the awakening of a young woman to see beyond her communities teachings. Lacey's journey from darkness into light, from powerlessness to self-determination comes to a satisfying conclusion.I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.