Chelsea Bieker

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

Godshot

erin alise 

The loneliness of a monster can only become sentimental after it is dead.

I decided then I’d tell [her] to be ugly. To make herself as ugly as possible and not worry too much about beauty or what any- one thought of her. To be unpainted, to live in the breeze and stand under waterfalls and not be worried over the height of mountains, of quiet trails deep in the woods. To not be scared of roads slick vith rain, of valleys dry in drought. I'd tell her no fear and she'd know it as the deepest truth and she would be everything I was not. She would be wild and free. And I wouldn't worry because I alone cnew the secret. That through all of her ugliness, all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.

It was as if the smoke cleared out for just that moment, the stars blinked a blinding silver. It was my own wound before me.

She took my hand. She squeezed. “Whatever's happened to you can either make you beautiful, or it will ruin you forever. You decide."

I pulled my hand back. "I'm not beautiful." 

"I don't mean beautiful like you're thinking, I mean beautiful. I mean, deep and changed. Affected. Wise. When you see a woman like that, you know. She's beautiful because of her undoing. Beautiful because she rebirthed herself from ashes."

Women's needs had never been mentioned in the church, never mentioned by anyone that I could remember, and I lapped up any sign of them by instinct like a long-starved wolf. 

Arden Kowalski

4.5 stars. From front to back, this book is filled with topics that make me feel sick to read about. But it means a lot to me anyway. Full review to come.

Update: Bumping it to 5 for the impact it had on me.

Jennifer

Godshot is a tender tale about womanhood, resilience, as well as the danger of being in a cult-like mindset. Written in a beautiful and figurative prose, reading this book felt like diving deep into layers of gold glitters: it's refreshing and intriguing all the same.

What I enjoyed:

+ Writing style: This is by far the strongest asset of the novel. With its figurative writing and metaphors, Chelsea Bieker's writing really jumped off the pages and created vivid imageries in my mind (which also works well with colour theory). As someone who reads things quickly, I don't always form clear pictures when I'm reading but with Godshot I'm seeing a pretty well-formed landscape with quite some shiny & golden tint. 

+ Themes: This novel tackles the notion of womanhood, religious oppression, and resilience at a great success. As much as this a tale of Lacey May's story of coming of age, this is also a story about the toxicity of being in a cult. Abandoned by her mother, Lacey had to navigate through the oppression in this cult-like community with resilience in order to understand what genuine love is like. I thought this was done really well through her character arc: her lens changed from that of a young teen to a woman throughout the story.

+ Worldbuilding: I think Bieker managed to flesh out a pretty dystopian yet solid worldbuilding in Godshot, despite the heavy character focus in the book. I think the details of the worldbuilding are nicely connected with Lacey May's narrative so I didn't feel like the descriptions are info-dumping.

Quotes that I love: I have highlighted numerous quotes in my iPad as I read this book, thanks to the sublime figurative writing that made this book stand out. I felt that these quotes enhanced the themes that Bieker tries to convey throughout the story.

"Having a beautiful mother was both a jewel in my crown and a curse. Beauty attracted the wrong sorts of things and people all the time."

"They loved the love and it showered them. They returned from the love cleaner than before and wore it like aura, a pastel rainbow above soft curls."

"Family was a strange idea, how it connected us by appearance, locking us to one another through similar noses, cheekbones, smirks."

"I knew about pale blues. How one day I'd live in a bright, light house painted in those blues. Water would flow from our faucets clear and cool. The vines out my windows would be green and lush and of another place."

"I knew the universe was just code for God among people who didn't believe in God, but really truly did believe in God deep down and didn't want the responsibility."

What didn't work for me:

- Graphical descriptions: My concerns with the graphical content is quite a subjective take. Personally, I'm not very fond of detailed descriptions for certain stuff. This includes - vomiting, illnesses, sexual violence, and pregnancy. While I understand that these are included in order to convey the major themes in the book, I felt that these are a tad too detailed for my taste.

- Secondary characters: While I thought the Lacey May was reasonably well fleshed out character-wise, I wasn't as sold into the support characters. I felt that the narratives of male characters lacked nuance (so I didn't find them particularly likeable), comparing to the character arcs of the female characters.

Despite my personal concerns with the graphical content, Godshot is nevertheless an accomplished debut which triumphed in its gorgeous prose and thematic explorations on resilience & religious oppression under a dystopian setting. If you could put up with the triggering content, this is a wonderful coming of age novel for anyone who's into figurative writing style & universal central themes.

N.B. This book contains following major triggering content: abandonment, childbirth, sexual violence / abuse, vomit, +full list of content warnings

(3.5 stars out of 5)

Ana Couto

I recently finished GODSHOT by Chelsea Bieker (out today -- one week early!) and all I can say is that the inside is just as dazzling as the mesmerizing cover. 

The story follows fourteen-year-old Lacey May, a young girl living in Peaches, California (a community under the control of cult leader Pastor Vern), and whose alcoholic mother has suddenly abandoned her. Ultimately, this story is a beautiful exploration of mother-daughter relationships, and all the complexities involved in them. As the novel progressed, I loved watching Lacey come into her own and figure out who she is and what she wants in life, separate from her mother's wishes and that of her cult-like community. She starts off as a naive and gullible teenager, but ends as a determined and confident young woman. This book was on my list of most anticipated releases of 2020, and it 100% surpassed my expectations. If, like me, your preference in books lies in stories written BY women and ABOUT women, then definitely add this book to your TBR!

Thank you to Catapult and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Becca W

Chloe Todd

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 find her mother no matter what it takes. 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.

Godshot

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