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.In Peaches, California there is no rain, but there is plenty of belief in Pastor Vern. 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.
This “fiercely written and endlessly readable” novel of a teenage girl in thrall to a magnetic-and terrifying-preacher who promises to save her dying town is “a godsend” (Entertainment Weekly).ĭrought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. For fans of Janet Fitch’s White Oleander and Emma Cline’s The Girls, a dazzling literary debut by Rona Jaffe Award winner Chelsea Bieker about one teenage girl’s feminist awakening and her search for her missing mother
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