Godshot

When I was in the Peace Corps, our country director would always tell us, “You're not here to suffer,” by which he meant that Peace Corps volunteers often have a mindset of, “Well, I'm supposed to be roughing it and I'm here to help people, so I guess I should just put up with XYZ unacceptable behavior.” This was both a funny thing to hear repeatedly and also reassuring.

Anyway, I picked up this book because it had a sparkly gold cover and it had something to do with cults, and I like sparkles and I'm interested in cults. This book seems to be about a fairly standard-issue patriarchal cult with one questionably charismatic male leader who is interested in subjugating all the women of his flock. It was hard for me to tell if this is meant to be a satire or not–the cult leader's name is Vern and people say things like “In Vern we trust” which seem comical to me, but it's set against some extremely grim details and I didn't make it very far into this book.

I got a few chapters in and it was clearly just very gritty and bleak in a way that I'm not generally interested in reading. And then in chapter 4 there was a detailed description of a dead cat on the highway as well as a metaphorical anecdote about how that same cat had previously killed her own kittens because she wasn't ready to be a mother, and the book's child narrator discovered the dead kittens.

And I read that, and I kept going for one more chapter, and then I said to myself, “You're not here to suffer,” and I did myself the favor of returning this book to the library.

If you are a cult enthusiast with a stronger stomach than I have, perhaps you will appreciate this book. It's pretty clearly not for me.

This is a cult story, and it's a story of mothers and daughters. Of loving and trusting and wanting to believe, despite running up against people and ideas that don't deserve your love and trust. All the description of the drought, the heat, the lack of water, the thirst, the stickiness of soda .. was very visceral. Similar the crippling sensation of being locked into a place, an upbringing, a culture - that seems impossible to escape. There's a punk vibe to this, with the cheap glam and glitter of it all, the level of sexual explicitness, and its cool attitude towards that (despite the protagonist being rather young), which I enjoyed but feel could have pushed a bit further. Because of the plot I'd compare it to [b:The Girls 26893819 The Girls Emma Cline https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1492065338l/26893819.SY75.jpg 42856015], and it has a similar US writing-program vibe to it, but I definitely enjoyed this one more.

This is a really hard book to rate. Definite trigger warning for abuse, rape, neglect. Yet the protagonist is very compelling, and especially in the last half of the book, I could not stop turning the pages. One burning question, though, is why nobody tried to intervene sooner? That part was so unbelievable to me. The minute Daisy knew the full extent of what Lacey Mae went through, she should've called a social worker.