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.
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0 0As an examination of womanhood and motherhood, I loved what Bieker is saying. Womanhood has unavoidable suffering, from conforming to or rebelling against societal expectations, to the contradiction of purity culture with sexual expression, being an object of the male gaze and therefore somehow responsible for their actions, the actual physical suffering of childbirth. But womanhood is also full of incomparable joy and strength - women supporting women, motherhood, vulnerability, starting new and rebuilding. Bieker's female characters are complex and real, a stark contrast to her male characters who blindly obey, lack agency in their own lives, and blame others.
The most impactful depiction of this is how Lacey consumes warm soda and canned scraps of foods like pig feet within Peaches - processed, unfulfilling, and ultimately detrimental. With other women who accept and support her, Lacey drinks cool, filtered water, experiences comforts deprived from her in her normal life. <spoiler> She dips her feet in the sea, she bathes in a jacuzzi tub. She experiences true 'baptism' and rebirth in the comfort of other women who allow her to exist as she is without expectations, versus the fake baptisms in warm soda that occur for show within the church </spoiler>. Womanhood is nourishing, it is a necessity.
If I went into this book expecting the cult to be a backdrop instead of the main show, I likely would've enjoyed this a lot more. However, I still really enjoyed the message and outcome.
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