God Shot
by

God Shot by Chelsea Bieker

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 27 seconds

God Shot by Chelsea Bieker, one of NPR’s Books We Love from 2020, is about the town of Peaches, California, where drought has settled in for the long term. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms.

In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. Everybody is praying for survival through secret “assignments” to bring the rain.

God Shot is an enjoyable read. However, I first found it challenging to accept Pastor Vern’s assignments, especially to Lacey May and her fellow teenage girls. Would people believe in a cult leader and get “assignments” that involve women fully accepting male domination in the twenty-first century? When I had doubts, I would wake up, listen to the news, or read the papers and discover that it is plausible and does happen in our world.

After being god-shot, Lacey May becomes one day at a time feminist as she has to rely on herself and other women who do not accept Pastor Vern’s divine leadership. Slowly but surely, she and her friends find a miracle to help them escape not only the environmental disaster caused by the drought but the moral depravity of Pastor Vern.

Goodreads provides this overview of the God Shot.

Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit, humor, and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. 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.

I recommend this novel without reservations!

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Revolutionary Mothers

Read: February 2019

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Revolutionary Mothers

by Carol Berkin

Revolutionary Mothers by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women’s History Professor at Baruch College, is one of four books I purchased after my first One Day University Class on February 9, 2019. It should be required reading!

The book explains how women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers, and fathers died.

It was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. She explains the mystery of Molly Pitcher (she was not a person but a group of women), camp followers, women who spied for their country, Loyalist women, and the impact on African American and Native women.

This intelligent and comprehensive history brings these forgotten stories to their rightful place in the struggle for American independence. Dr. Birkin also highlights how their efforts set the stage for the continuing campaign for gender equality.

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Sea of Tranquility

Read: September 2022

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Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading list for months. I recommend the book without reservations. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. It was a page-turner from page one.

With the delay of Artemis I, I have been thinking a lot about the Sea of Tranquility, the original lunar landing site. Sea of Tranquility reminded me of the days of my youth when we believed that NASA would colonize the moon as it is in the novel.

One of the passages that moved me was when Olive Llewellyn asked, “What if it always is the end of the world.” A second profound passage asks, “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview,

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East

Read: January 2023

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When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East

by Quan Barry

When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East by Quan Barry is a luminous novel that moves across a windswept Mongolia as a pair of estranged twin brothers make a journey of duty, conflict, and renewed understanding. Since Jan died, I have been sharing her love and not looking for her, so this novel attracted me as it was a counter-narrative. Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something more significant?

When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East is a stunningly far-flung examination of our struggle to retain our convictions and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, as well as a meditation on accepting what is.

Although I know only a limited amount about Buddhism and even less about Mongolia, I found When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East a fascinating page-turner of a novel.

Coincidently, while en route to see Memorial, we stopped to eat at a Mexican-Peruvian restaurant on Tenth Avenue in NYC. On the television was a continuous loop of a travelogue on Mongolia.

I found several quotes that I have used in other posts already.

  • “Sometimes faith is the only medicine available.”
  • “When the only hope is a boat and there is no boat, I will be the boat.”

I plan to use others in future posts.

Love never dies, and this quote echoed my belief.

“Love is neither created nor destroyed. It exists at all times and in all dimensions. Love is not something we create—it is something that wells up in us, like sap in a tree. It is an element in the fabric of the universe. Even on that distant day when sentient beings no longer exist, Love carries on. Perhaps our personal relationship to Love is impermanent, but Love itself is not.”

I highly recommend When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama somewhere in the vast Mongolian landscape, the young monk Chuluun seeks the help of his identical twin, Mun, who was recognized as a reincarnation himself as a child but has since renounced their once shared monastic life.

Harking back to her vivid and magical first novel set in Vietnam, Quan Barry carries us across a landscape as unforgiving as it is beautiful and culturally varied, from the stark Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khan. As their country stretches before them, questions of the immortal soul, along with more earthly matters of love, sex, and brotherhood, haunt the twins, who can hear each other’s thoughts.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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The Bully Pulpit

Read: October 2019

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The Bully Pulpit

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin is a history of the first decade of the Progressive era told by focusing on the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Although I had read many books about Theodore Roosevelt, I had limited knowledge about Taft until I read this book. Reading about their friendship and its eventual collapse helped me to understand both of these presidents and the times in which they lived in a way I had not understood previously.

The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S. S. McClure.

Goodwin’s narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before Roosevelt’s death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of both men.

I recommend this book without reservations.

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Nobody Gets Out Alive- Stories

Read: February 2023

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Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories

by Leigh Newman

Nobody Gets Out Alive: Stories by Leigh Newman, set in Newman’s home state of Alaska and an exciting virtuosic story collection about women navigating the wilds of a male-dominated society. Nobody Gets Out Alive is a collection of dazzling, courageous stories about women struggling to survive, not just grizzly bears and charging moose but the raw, exhausting legacy of their marriages and families.

There are moments when characters in a story leap off the page and become, for a few moments, our soul mates. Ms. Newman, in each of these memorable stories, engages so fully that each character becomes so alive that I wanted to know more about their lives.

The stores span both the recent past and the founding of Anchorage. I found all of them to be stories I would happily read again. The recent stories highlight the common desire for a freer, more inclusive world for women. A woman forced to sell her home or a new bride testing limits on her return home resonates as themes of the modern world.

The final story is set in 1915 in a railroad camp. The story highlights the founding of Anchorage. As one who likes historical fiction, I was so engaged that I could not take a break. I was not expecting the outspoken heiress would stage an elaborate theatrical to seduce the wife of her husband’s employer.

I may never visit Alaska at my age, but I now know enough to feel I have lived in Seward’s Folly.

I decided to read this book after reading Ms. Newman wrote a review of The Faraway World. Ms. Newman is a skilled writer, and I highly recommend this collection and look forward to reading more of her stories in the future.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In “Howl Palace”—winner of The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize, a Best American Short Story, and Pushcart Prize selection—an aging widow struggles with a rogue hunting dog and the memories of her five ex-husbands while selling her house after bankruptcy. In the title story, “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” newly married Katrina visits her hometown of Anchorage. She blows up her wedding reception by flirting with the host and running off with an enormous mastodon tusk.

Alongside stories set in today’s Last Frontier—rife with suburban sprawl, global warming, and opioid addiction—Newman delves into the remote wilderness of the 1970s and 80s, bringing to life young girls and single moms in search of a wilder, more accessible, more adventurous America. The final story takes place in a railroad camp in 1915, where an outspoken heiress stages an elaborate theatrical to seduce the wife of her husband’s employer, revealing how this masterful storyteller is “not only writing unforgettable, brilliantly complex characters, she’s somehow inventing souls” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light).

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

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When We Cease to Understand the World

Read: September 2024

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When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

Today, I began reading When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. This book, listed on The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, promises to be thought-provoking as it delves into the intricate connections between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.

In a world where scientific advancements often involve ethical dilemmas and societal implications, this book offers a unique perspective on the lives of scientists who have shaped our understanding of the world. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger are some of the luminaries whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut deeply explores in his fictional examination. Labatut shows how these scientists and thinkers grappled with profound questions of existence, experiencing strokes of unparalleled genius, alienating friends and lovers, and descending into isolation and insanity. Their discoveries, some of which significantly improved human life, while others led to chaos and unimaginable suffering, continue to shape our world.

With a breakneck pace and a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses fiction’s imaginative resources to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

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