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 mouse 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. Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed.' -T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girlsĭrought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. “Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander crossed with Geek Love or Cruddy, and then add cults, God, motherhood, girlhood, class, deserts, witches, the divinity of women. But most of all, these pages contain so, so much divine feminine truth - a resource that is, to me, a substance more precious than gold. Finally, there's Lacy May's voice, which carries us through her faith, her doubts, her encounters with evil and despair, her bravery in the face of power, and her love-fueled search that won't stop until she's found some solid ground. Then there's the hot-blooded and vibrant cast of characters that populate Lacey May's world, from her taxidermy-loving grandmother to her near-famous lawn-painting boyfriend and the acid-scarred callgirl who saves. First, there's the cult backdrop itself, a dried-up, glitter-blasted, heat-lined horror show that manages to mirror and amplify the more nightmarish aspects of a misogynistic society. Now I can be tough on cult novels but this one's got my heart. Lacey May is 14 and living in Peaches, a drought-ridden town in Central California that has turned to the proselytizing Pastor Vern and his promise of relief rain in exchange for nothing less than their total devotion, when her mother is exiled from the community on the back of the bike of a Turquoise Cowboy, leaving Lacey to fend for herself against a desperate and wanting parish.

Godshot book review