The religious zealotry, the single narrow perspective, the control, the idolization of pregnancy and pregnant women… I can see the parallels. I'm also surprised no one has thought to pull out the ol' The Handmaid's Tale comparison. A gritty, ugly, yet oddly empowering tale about girls. Arnold would write if she turned her talents to adult fiction. I also think this might be the kind of thing Elana K. The White Oleander comparison is a good one. It feels dystopian due to the claustrophobic, stifling feel of the novel, but it's not really.
About religion and the way it can be used to control women's bodies. About mothers and daughters, and the often difficult relationships between them- about what it is to love so deeply a mother who has failed you. “Women have a long history of suffering.” 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. 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. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances. 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 go on a quest to 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 mice 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. Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California.
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