Name: Godshot
Rating: 3.854166666666667 (24 reviews)
ISBN: 9781948226486

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

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)

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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