Seven years earlier, when he arrived in Peaches, he 'had knelt in the dry burrs and thrown up his hands' just as the skies opened up. Parishioners believe Vern, because he proved it once.

They pour that yearning into their worship at Gifts of the Spirit Church, where Pastor Vern promises that faith in God-and, more importantly, faith in Vern-can bring rain. Thirsty for salvation.īesieged by a drought that has turned their Central Valley town from the home of bountiful raisin farms to a dusty land of 'hay-dead field,” the people of Peaches need to believe that the rains will return again. 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 Chelsea Bieker's debut novel Godshot (Catapult), the fictional town of Peaches, California, is thirsty. 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. 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. 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. Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed.' -T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girlsĭrought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. “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.

Godshot chelsea bieker