Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Godshot: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Godshot: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Godshot: A Novel
    Ebook352 pages6 hours

    Godshot: A Novel

    By Chelsea Bieker

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

  • An explosive literary debut about a young woman coming into her own power in the face of religious extremism, addiction, sexual abuse, and abandonment, Godshot is an unforgettable novel of resilience, poverty, womanhood, and strength found where you least expect it
  • Godshot is propulsive and heart-breaking and bursting with sentences to slay you, to make you gasp with how Chelsea Bieker renders detail. Bieker is a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist. Her fiction has echoes of Claire Vaye Watkins and Lauren Groff, Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy, and yet her voice is so entirely her own.
  • Godshot effortlessly explores the repression of female sexuality, motherhood (and motherloss), climate change, poverty, and the controlling power of cult mentality through the world of Lacey May, our indelible 14-year-old protagonist growing up in the dried-up town of Peaches, CA.
  • Lacey May has only known two things: her life before Pastor Vern made the rain come to Peaches, and her life after, and her life before was far worse. But when at 14 she receives her “assignment” from the Church, along with all the other newly fertile young women of the congregation, she finally begins to question whether the glitter raining down in church is really from the heavens, or from the hand of Pastor Vern’s daughter in the rafters.
  • Bieker is a supremely talented world-builder with a flair for visual details; the world of Godshot is a barren, impoverished town of baptisms conducted with off-brand Cola, front lawns painted neon green, a magenta hearse with a casket still inside, a bright yellow bathing suit with worn elastic, a machine gun painted gold. It's rare to find someone who is so good on the sentence level, and someone who is also so invested in character and story.
  • For fans of all-too-real explorations of the way women’s bodies are policed and controlled, like Women Talking; novels that capture the relationships between mothers and daughters, like White Oleander; and unforgettable young protagonists, like History of Wolves
  • Bieker is the winner a 2018 Rona Jaffe Award. Catapult has also acquired the rights to Bieker’s forthcoming short story collection, Cowboys and Angels
  • Bieker lives in Fresno, CA, with strong communities throughout the Central Valley, and in Portland,OR
  • Acquired by Catapult editor in chief Jonathan Lee (whose acquisitions also include Rough Magic, Welcome to Lagos, and Reservoir 13)

    Select Bookseller Praise for Godshot

  • "Godshot by Chelsea Bieker has everything I could want in a novel: cults, crazed pastors, and characters questioning what it means to be a girl and mother. Set in a small town in California plagued by drought, a cultlike church has formed around a crazed pastor intent on ending the drought. Abandoned by her mother for a man she barely knows, Lacey May—just fourteen—becomes the focus of Pastor Vern's insane plan to bring rain back to the town. As she embarks on a mission to find her mother, she has to come to terms with the horrible circumstances Vern has put her and the town in. Godshot is dark, fierce, and brilliant, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since I finished it." —Sarah Cassavant, Subtext Books (St Paul, MN)
  • "Godshot announces the arrival of a powerful new voice. Chelsea Bieker’s debut novel kept me mesmerized till the very end. I felt the heat, the sand, the want, the confusion, and the pain on every page. This is the sun-drenched California nightmare of Claire Vaye Watkins and Joan Didion, and yet it is also an incredible story of resilience and rebirth. Godshot is sure to be one of the most talked-about novels of the year." —Emily Ballaine, Green Apple Books on the Park (San Francisco, CA)
  • "Filled with the raw need of zealotry, Godshot embodies all the glitter and
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateMar 31, 2020
    ISBN9781948226493
    Author

    Chelsea Bieker

    Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award and her fiction and essays have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, Catapult magazine, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among other publications. She was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship and holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Godshot is her first novel.

    Related to Godshot

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      What Grief Tastes Like

      Apr 21, 2021

      What Grief Tastes Like
      5 min read

    • Article

      Maggie Shipstead: ‘In Fiction, You Can “Get At” Attractions That Don’t Fit The Mould Of Appropriateness’

      May 4, 2021

      The journalists who’ve interviewed me so far about the book have all commented that there’s ‘a lot of sex in it’,” says Maggie Shipstead, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. There’s a lot of everything. We’ll come back to the sex and all its i

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Millions Top Ten: September 2017

      Oct 16, 2017

      This month marks the entrée of two newcomers. The post The Millions Top Ten: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Steph Opitz

      Dec 17, 2018

      I put down a lot of books that didn’t do it for me, and shuffled and reshuffled my to-be-read pile to my heart’s content. It’s been liberating. The post A Year in Reading: Steph Opitz appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday

      Feb 10, 2022

      Tuesday, she made him a drink. He was seated in the armchair. It was 7:02 p.m. Dinner had been served at 6:00 p.m., after which the kitchen was so thoroughly cleanedthat not even a single crumb remained. He had not spoken to her during or after the m

      7 min read

    • Article

      Lily King

      Apr 25, 2020

      Award-winning and bestselling author Lily King’s latest book, Writers & Lovers, is set in the Boston area during the 1990s. This cleverly written novel features a compelling protagonist, a struggling 31-year-old writer named Casey. Readers follow Cas

      2 min read

    • Article

      When I Say Goodbye

      May 31, 2018

      When I Say Goodbye
      16 min read

    • Article

      The Other Child

      Dec 1, 2018

      The Other Child
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Bryan Washington

      Dec 3, 2018

      1. This year, I read a lot on my phone. That’s a habit I’ve picked up from working gigs where you stand a bunch (watching kids on a swingset, watching adult children park their cars). Some folks don’t vibe with that, but those folks don’t pay my bill

      4 min read

    Reviews for Godshot

    4.5/5

    58 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I was hooked by the premise as soon as I read it. This is a book largely about mothers and daughters, but also about religious zealotry, faith, resiliency, and love. This book was a bit of a slow burn at first, but then towards the middle the pacing became more steady. The author writes vividly of the stark landscape; you can see and feel the parched earth, the stark isolation Lacey finds herself in.There are many characters that make up this book, but care is taken to each one. Lacey is naive and smart at the same time; often times I was yelling at her to make another decision or at the horrible ones made by others. There were certain situations occurring where I wished I could physically pluck out the characters from the pages.I do wish there was a bit more to the epilogue in regards to other characters, and I did have some questions about the town itself that went unanswered. Overall this was a gritty yet captivating book, and I look forward to the author’s next work.
    • 5/5
      Such a good book. It hurts, it gives you hope, it is beautifully written.
    • 4/5
      What I was reading repulsed me but I could not put down Chelsea Bieker's debut novel Godshot. Lacey's narrative voice drew me in, her conflicted nativity and faith struggling to survive as her family and community fails to protect her. The novel reaches into the deepest questions of life and illustrates the limitations of love and faith.The tragic series of events and abuse endured will be hard for some to follow; this is a dark story. But just when it seems that Lacey has lost everything, including control over her own life, she finds salvation.Drought has hit the town of Peaches, the orchards turned to dust. Pastor Vern finds the community ripe for hope and promises to deliver rain if they believe in him. Isolating the community from the world, believers allow him total control.Pastor Vern brings good to some. Lacey's mother found strength to overcome her alcoholism. Pastor Vern also destroys as he wields his total power. His plan to create a perfected church involves assignments, special purposes that believers long to be given. They want to be Godshot. Lacey's mother's assignment takes her on a downward spiral until she abandons Lacey to run off with a man filled with false promises. Lacey is taken in by her grandmother, one of Pastor Vern's unthinking believers. Lacey desperately misses her mother and endeavors to track her down, her search to learn taking her into the world beyond the Godshot.Lacey's assignment begins her journey of doubt. Would God require such things?The novel touches on so many hot-button issues relating to the social status and role of women, the persistence of human hope placed in unreliable leaders, the love of a child for her mother, and the awakening of a young woman to see beyond her communities teachings. Lacey's journey from darkness into light, from powerlessness to self-determination comes to a satisfying conclusion.I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
    • 5/5
      Oh, my gosh, this is one of the books in the memes that show what your face looks like when you discover the meaning of the title. I hesitate to say too much about this book about a cult religious leader who has a following in a California farming town that used to be known for its raisins. Since the drought, though, everything, even the people have dried up. They were ripe for some charismatic faith healer who has rewritten himself into the Bible, but where he leds them is shocking and I think other readers will be as surprised as I am that a phone sex business owner turns out to have the most morals and care the most for a young pregnant girl.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful book that dives so much deeper than just growing up in a cult. It explores the life and struggles of a young girl and her journey to finding herself, amidst everything.
    • 1/5
      I tried to overlook the description & give it a go...next time I’ll follow my instincts. It’s as bad as you think it might be upon reading the title & description...NOTHING redeeming about this book whatsoever.
      The only positive, if you can view it as such is that it’s a clever way for the left to attack religion through the lens of liberalism, feminism & female sexuality.

      I’d give this negative stars if I could.

      1 person found this helpful