She observes, "Whatever’s happened to you can either make you beautiful, or it will ruin you forever. (Interestingly, Bieker told NPR that her own mother left when she was nine years old.) Lacey May is an endlessly sympathetic character naive at times and street smart at others. It's a relationship that repeatedly brings up the question of how you can continue to love someone who has done nothing but hurt you. While Godshot's supporting characters are often compelling-particularly the mother-daughter duo Daisy and Florin, who run a phone sex operation and are among Lacey May's only supporters on her quest to find her mother-the relationship between Lacey May and her mother makes up the book's core. It was such a small sacrifice, to use soda instead of water, that I almost mistook it for a thrill." "We filled an abandoned bathtub behind the church with liters of Check Mate Cola and one by one he held us under just long enough for the lungs to burn, for fearful desperation to set in, and we came up gasping and sticky, his face the first face we saw, a God to us.There was no wasting water, and so the soda would do. As Lacey May continues to endure the increasingly appalling acts of men, she begins to uncover Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides to find her mother, no matter what it takes.Īmidst the trauma and near-constant struggle, however, are hints of dark humor, like when church congregants are baptized using soda. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her grandmother Cherry, a taxidermy-obsessed widow who also lives in Peaches, and is hopelessly devoted to Pastor Vern.
Soon enough, Lacey May's mother is exiled from the community and runs off with the latest in a string of bad boyfriends. To do this, they're given different "assignments," and are warned never to speak of their assignments to anyone else. Out of desperation, the town's residents have turned to Pastor Vern, a charismatic religious zealot who says he can lead them away from sin and into a new world where their faith is rewarded with water.
It's where 14-year-old Lacey May lives with her alcoholic mother at the beginning of Godshot, a stunning debut novel by Chelsea Bieker. In Peaches, California, a devastating drought has replaced lush greenery with dry, cracked earth.
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