Godshot
by Chelsea Bieker
Read or Download at: http://best.ebookcollection.space/?book=B07VTKV187
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).
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.
“[A]
haunting debut . . . 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'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
“Drawn
in brilliant, bizarre detail—baptism in warm soda, wisdom from romance
novels—Lacey's twin crises of faith and femininity tangle powerfully. Fiercely
written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend. A-.”—Mary
Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly
“[An]
absolute masterpiece . . . 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
Product
details
File Size :
2609 KB
Print Length : 336 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN : 1948226480
Publisher :
Catapult (March 31, 2020)
Publication Date : March 31, 2020
Language : English
ASIN : B07VTKV187
No comments:
Post a Comment