Finished April 25. 2021. Five stars.
Godshot by Chelsea Bieker
If you're anything like me, you'd find yourself absolutely magnetized by this cover, especially if it's in the "new in paperback" section of an independent bookstore's website and it's 3 AM because you had insomnia from drinking coffee too late in the day. Obviously I bought it (as well as some other things, of course) and WOW I had no clue this book would swoop me into it's world and steal my heart.
You say the words "teenage girl" "cult" and "desert" and I am THERE dude, which is how this book hooked me in but it is so much more than that. Lacey May is this fascinating character and narrator who regularly changes her mind about life, is deceitful, doing her best, and also abused. She is so many things at once, as we all are, and I think Bieker really excels at showing how the trauma Lacey May has endured shapes every ill-advised or downright reckless decision she makes. There's also this incredibly sensory experience of the desert and the drought in the town, which for my lil Vegas heart just...it speaks to me. Which is not to say that I've endured anything Lacey May went through, but that it's hard to spend your childhood and adolescence in the desert and not feel the possibility of danger lurking in every corner. That's one of my favorite things about this book, that the desert is also one of the characters--more than just a place, there but only menacingly, but part of your every day and your physical body nonetheless. It's exquisite.
There's always this feeling of sensationalism surrounding cults or religious extremist groups, and I think Bieker does a really good job of normalizing that experience. Not in the sense that it's endorsed, just that you're lulled into this same feeling that all the GOTS-ers have, that you're in pure desperation mode, you have nothing else, you know nothing else, you're holding out for one breath of hope and this dude throwing glitter on you and preaching about salvation and the coming flood all while wearing weird wizard robes and taking breaks on a dog bed is...you know, all you have. These are people at their wits end, the textbook definition of desperation.
Also worth mentioning is of course the fierce group of women that Lacey May meets and oh my goodness all my love to Hazel the doula who is LITERALLY everything I want to be in life. Truly.
By no means is this an easy book to read, especially if you're sensitive about religious discussion and pregnancy/mother stuff. I've heard some people say they struggle with the pacing and plot of this book, that it drags and nothing happens or it's slow and I simply disagree. For me, the structure of the book mirrors Lacey May's experience of that time in the desert--grueling, relentless, dripping slowly like molasses, one day blurring into the next until one day goes by and one month goes by and then it's been a year. I thought it was really well done and I absolutely adore this book.
