This book is a wild ride verging on the ridiculous but firmly planted in reality. Lacey May Herd is a 14 year old girl trapped in a cult and is fighting each day discovering more about herself, the world, and her faith as she's forced to comply with the whims of the church's leader Vern.

The prose is so wonderful - it focuses on the mundane, comparing and contrasting against the absurd to bring the setting into life. Lacey's narrative stays innocent, both appropriate for her age and not, tainted by the things she's forced to endure. It's bitter and it's sweet as she grows too fast but not fast enough.

The plot, I feel, is rather straightforward with the kinds of twists that make you think "oh no, when do they make it all stop? How far will it go before it blows up?", a good kind of anxiety.

I think the main focus is Lacey's and her mother's relationship - or lack thereof, a constant undercurrent from page one to the last sentence. I think it's more about breaking cycles than it is about her mother, who is the kind that even if they're present, they're emotionally absent. The moment her mother leaves, she's filled with "motherloss", the abandonment, the repressed memories of past abuse by her mother's boyfriends, the longing for a mother's love. And though she lives with her maternal grandmother, Cherry, she's confronted by the reality that her mother was just another link in the chain. I think it was the learning that motherly love doesn't HAVE to come from your biological mother, but also you can become the person you've always wanted in your own life. Manifest it.

I 100% cried at the end. It was satisfying, reflective, and touched on each theme of the book (what is faithfulness, what is motherhood, found families and breaking cycles). I couldn't be happier that I picked this book up. ( )

The Wisest at 14

In her debut novel, Chelsea Bieker adds another voice calling out men taking advantage of and abusing women, and some women, for personal reasons, being complicit in their treatment. Turns out that smartest kid in the down and out, drought-stricken town of Peaches, CA, is 14-year-old Lacy May, even as she finds herself caught in the whirlwind of bad things happening to her.

Peaches, once a prosperous Central Valley grape growing area and raisin producer, has lost everything due to a persistent drought. What it hasn’t lost and what has proven to be its weakness: Hope. Conmen and grifters know how to exploit such hope born of desperation, especially when combined with an ardent belief in a living and intervening god. Such a con artist, Pastor Vern, has subsumed the town in his version of church and prophet, convincing all that he, and they with their sacrifice and loyalty to him, can implore their god to send down abundant, reinvigorating rain. Through freakish good fortune, he showed up in time to perform a gaudy rain dance of sorts that did seem to result in a downpour early on, with brief effect. Now the townspeople belong to his church, abide by wishes, including forsaking drinking or using water in anyway and submitting to a ritual that turns all of their daughters as young as Lacy into sacrificial lambs, nothing short of the mass rape of these girls by a deluded group of adolescent boys on behalf of the Pastor. Lacy, though powerless to resist, seems to be the only one who appreciates how morally corrupt all this is, apart from a small group of outcast women who operate a phone sex line and offer up salvation as a sideline.

This may sound crazy and not a little repugnant to you, and much in the book will offend many people. However, that appears to be the point: to illustrate how women and young girls fall victim to men and how easily people can be not only duped but inculcated into a belief system that defies all reason, not to mention reality. And how in this state of group mesmerization they can’t escape, even if remaining will destroy them. As fictional as this may seem, readers have only to cast their minds back on religious cults as destructive to human decency and life as Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate, to cite a few of the deadliest.

Reviewers have called this a coming of age novel, and in the sense that a child has to weave her way through a flood of dysfunction, from an alcoholic mother who deserted her on the false hope of stardom and looney grandmother who taxidermies and talks to little rodents, it is. However, the exaggerated writing lends the novel a cartoonish tone that maybe doesn’t serve the subjects very well. That said, however, those not put off by the tone and graphic descriptions of aberrant behavior should find it compelling.
( )

The Wisest at 14

In her debut novel, Chelsea Bieker adds another voice calling out men taking advantage of and abusing women, and some women, for personal reasons, being complicit in their treatment. Turns out that smartest kid in the down and out, drought-stricken town of Peaches, CA, is 14-year-old Lacy May, even as she finds herself caught in the whirlwind of bad things happening to her.

Peaches, once a prosperous Central Valley grape growing area and raisin producer, has lost everything due to a persistent drought. What it hasn’t lost and what has proven to be its weakness: Hope. Conmen and grifters know how to exploit such hope born of desperation, especially when combined with an ardent belief in a living and intervening god. Such a con artist, Pastor Vern, has subsumed the town in his version of church and prophet, convincing all that he, and they with their sacrifice and loyalty to him, can implore their god to send down abundant, reinvigorating rain. Through freakish good fortune, he showed up in time to perform a gaudy rain dance of sorts that did seem to result in a downpour early on, with brief effect. Now the townspeople belong to his church, abide by wishes, including forsaking drinking or using water in anyway and submitting to a ritual that turns all of their daughters as young as Lacy into sacrificial lambs, nothing short of the mass rape of these girls by a deluded group of adolescent boys on behalf of the Pastor. Lacy, though powerless to resist, seems to be the only one who appreciates how morally corrupt all this is, apart from a small group of outcast women who operate a phone sex line and offer up salvation as a sideline.

This may sound crazy and not a little repugnant to you, and much in the book will offend many people. However, that appears to be the point: to illustrate how women and young girls fall victim to men and how easily people can be not only duped but inculcated into a belief system that defies all reason, not to mention reality. And how in this state of group mesmerization they can’t escape, even if remaining will destroy them. As fictional as this may seem, readers have only to cast their minds back on religious cults as destructive to human decency and life as Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate, to cite a few of the deadliest.

Reviewers have called this a coming of age novel, and in the sense that a child has to weave her way through a flood of dysfunction, from an alcoholic mother who deserted her on the false hope of stardom and looney grandmother who taxidermies and talks to little rodents, it is. However, the exaggerated writing lends the novel a cartoonish tone that maybe doesn’t serve the subjects very well. That said, however, those not put off by the tone and graphic descriptions of aberrant behavior should find it compelling.
( )

I was hooked by the premise as soon as I read it. This is a book largely about mothers and daughters, but also about religious zealotry, faith, resiliency, and love. This book was a bit of a slow burn at first, but then towards the middle the pacing became more steady. The author writes vividly of the stark landscape; you can see and feel the parched earth, the stark isolation Lacey finds herself in.
There are many characters that make up this book, but care is taken to each one. Lacey is naive and smart at the same time; often times I was yelling at her to make another decision or at the horrible ones made by others. There were certain situations occurring where I wished I could physically pluck out the characters from the pages.
I do wish there was a bit more to the epilogue in regards to other characters, and I did have some questions about the town itself that went unanswered. Overall this was a gritty yet captivating book, and I look forward to the author’s next work. ( )

This is my favorite book of 2020 so far. I recently read a few of Bieker’s essays and short stories- she has a hold on voice that I am in awe of. This isn’t an easy read in terms of subject matter. a lot was hard to swallow. But there was nothing gratuitous and the writing flowed like the water Peaches wishes it had. ( )