Spoiler-Free Review

Every now and then, I read a book that I can’t decide if I’m enjoying. Godshot was like that. Ultimately, I think I’ve decided that it worked, even if it was unusual.

Click here for content warnings.

What’s Godshot about?

Lacey is a young girl whose family is part of a cult. Set on the backdrop of a small town suffering a drought, we follow Lacey through a coming-of-age story bent and twisted out of its usual shape by a pastor with strange ambitions for his flock.

This story was disturbing, but that was the point.

This was one of those stories that pairs uncomfortable content with an uncomfortable setting to create an all-around disturbing experience that still manages to dissect big themes in an interesting way.

The town of Peaches is starving and dehydrating – literally. The townspeople get their hydration from sodas. They’re eating canned goods of strange animal parts. The local cult baptizes their new converts in bathtubs full of soda. These details made the story felt…sticky. Rotting. It created an atmosphere of desperation, and among the cult members, a sense of righteous suffering.

Lacey is thirteen-years-old and has just gotten her first period. Her mother is an alcoholic and generally dysfunctional person, her grandmother is obsessed with taxidermy and has a house full of flies, and her pastor has rewritten the bible to include himself. Lacey, who doesn’t know better, doesn’t view her life as very unusual, but the wrongness of her environment does strike her somewhere deep down, and a lot of this story is about her confronting that wrongness and finding safety for herself.

I would not go so far as to describe this book as “trauma porn,” which is the term many use to describe stories that lean too heavily into the main character’s trauma beyond the needs of the story. Despite the heavy content and themes, I never got the sense that the author was overdoing it. The trauma Lacey did experience was handled with nuance, and it didn’t indulge in excess detail.

It could feel a little overwritten at times, but I found a rhythm with it. With all the sensory detail of the setting, I definitely felt myself look up from the book at my life, where I’m comfortable and safe and have clean water and access to healthcare, and felt immense gratitude. Wow.

Should you read Godshot?

This is one that I would recommend to specific audiences. You might like it if you enjoy stories that focus on religious trauma (specifically cults) and how that impacts a person’s coming-of-age. There are also themes around abandonment, mother-daughter dysfunction, sexual abuse, pregnancy and motherhood.

If you like stories like The Handmaid’s Tale, you’d probably like this one too.