Challenging her faith, Lacey May recognizes Pastor Vern’s manipulation of a broken community, aching for redemption. This is a book about corruption manifested through tacit obedience. Godshot is so much more than a coming-of-age novel it’s Lacey May’s evolutions-from faith to knowledge, girl to woman, daughter to mother-that inform the book’s other looming focuses of environmental ruin and the claustrophobia of cults. And once I locked into her voice I never really looked back.”
“It was so different and as soon as I finished, I just felt like I needed to write from the daughter’s perspective. Originally, the book was written from the point of view of Louise, Lacey May’s mother. Bieker began writing Godshot in 2013, the same year that she gave birth to her first child. Over the phone in Portland, Ore., Chelsea Bieker spoke with Observer about the book’s origins and inspiration. Forging her own path to womanhood, she confronts the fear, conventions, and assumptions that dominated her girlhood. With the help of another complicated mother and daughter, Lacey May begins to explore her own agency, coming to know her mind and body in equal time. Pastor Vern is a charismatic preacher whose unconventional methods include gold glitter raining down from the rafters as well as mysterious assignments for the faithful.Īfter becoming an unlikely handmaiden, pregnant with a child intended to be a part of a collective effort to save the flailing community, Lacey May becomes aware of her own sense of selfhood as a daughter and mother outside her narrow confines. In the wake of an endless drought, some farmers, including Lacey May’s grandfather, have committed suicide. Facing a drought, Peaches, Calif., has lost its former glory as a grape growing farm town. Once I was there, I couldn’t turn away.įourteen-year-old Lacey May Herd is a girl baptized by warm soda in a town without water. It was there that I found a score of desperate characters struggling for answers to impossible questions. Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot took my frayed nerves and transported me to the barren landscape of central California. Reading is both a release and a channel for those genuine emotions.
It’s important to acknowledge these are terrifying times.
But c omfort reading doesn’t need to involve compulsory reassurance.
Faced with the dilemma of what to read during this indefinite period of isolation, readers may ask themselves: what does comfort reading mean to you? For some this may be light hearted romps, humorous essays or hugely reassuring memoirs. Choosing a quarantine read, it turns out, is no small feat. After a month of social distancing and sheltering at home, how has your media diet changed? We crave mental engagement and focus, but we also want to lose ourselves.
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