Book Around the Corner

Freedom’s Child by Jax Miller (2015) French title: Les infâmes

I have a signed copy of Freedom’s Child by the bubbly Jax Miller who attended Quais du Polar last year. I’m going to reassure non-French speaking readers right away: this book is available in English. It was even written in English! Yay!

Freedom Oliver used to be Vanessa Delaney. She lives in Painter, Oregon and she used to live in Mastic Beach, New York. She used to be the mother of Ethan and Layla. They are now named Mason and Rebekah and were adopted by a preacher and his wife in Goshen, Kentucky. There are a lot of “used to” in Freedom’s life since she’s been living under the Witness Protection program for eighteen years. Her husband, Mark Delaney was murdered. First accused of killing him, Vanessa is later released and her brother-in-law Matthew, Mark’s brother, is convicted of the crime.

Freedom is a waitress in a bar, she tends to drown her sorrows in alcohol and follows her children’s life from afar, thanks to Facebook.  She doesn’t live, she survives.

Two simultaneous events will break her shell of a life. After 18 years in prison, Matthew is released and wants to take revenge. He managed to learn where Vanessa was hidden and with the help of his brother Luke, he intends to kidnap Freedom’s children to get to her. The other event that puts Freedom’s life upside down is that Rebekah goes missing. Now Freedom is on a mission, she’s determined to travel from Oregon to Kentucky to find her daughter. Mason, Rebekah’s brother, is also on his way. He is estranged from his adoptive family because their views on religion differ. As the book progresses, we discover that Virgil and Carol Paul, the adoptive family, have founded a cult and are convinced that God speaks to Virgil and gives him instructions.

And that’s all I’ll say about the plot.

Freedom’s Child follows several subplots and strands and they all join nicely in the end. I enjoyed Miller’s style, her vivid descriptions of places, like here in Kentucky:

About forty minutes after leaving the Bluegrass, Mason and Peter enter the Goshen Police Department, a one-room jail that dates back to the 1800s with a pillory and whipping post on the small patch of grass in front of the building, a reminder that Goshen held fast to outdated diligence and iron-fisted penalties to criminals and sinners alike, as far as modern law would allow.

For a French –and I suspect for a European in general— this is a very American novel. There’s the Witness Protection Program for once but mostly, it’s Goshen, its sheriff and its preacher than seem so outdated that you wonder if they are plausible characters. Jax Miller describes Goshen as…

A place so backward that the pursuit of justice became its own version of injustice, as seen in the occasional lynch mob that seeks their own righteousness by back-alley vigilantism like beatings and chasing out of town. A place where God’s grace became a weapon of suppression and acquiescence used by men in authority, big fish in small ponds who have nothing to do better than sit at home, boost their own egos, and jerk off to their own power trips.

Not where you’d want to go on holiday. Goshen and Virgil Paul reminded me of Hell on Church Street by Jake Hinkson, a very dark novel with a religious serial killer set in Arkansas. I don’t know how Americans see Kentucky, but hick seems to be often associated to its town names. Kentucky is the state that Kingsolver’s character Taylor leaves behind in The Bean Tree. She keeps repeating there’s nothing to do in Kentucky where Kingsolver herself was born and raised. And here Jax Miller doesn’t help Kentucky’s reputation. You sure don’t want to cross path with Virgil Paul, a sociopath that could only be born in the Bible Belt. These preachers are a genuine American species, there’s nothing like this in France or they’re considered as a cult.

I noticed that the Delaney brothers are named after the Evangelists, Luke, Mark, Matthew and the preacher’s last name was Paul. We have the four of them and they are dangerous and unbalanced criminals. The last and disabled Delaney brother is named Peter, and he’s the most humane one, the one who’ll help Freedom and in a sense, he had the keys to her paradise. Some things might be a bit too obvious and after reading Leaving Las Vegas, I’m not sure Freedom is a convincing alcoholic. That said, this is Jax Miller’s debut thriller and I’m sure she’ll polish her skills in the future. I did enjoy the ride and rooted for Freedom all along.

PS: For the anecdote, I’ll say that describing something as eggshell white doesn’t work at all for a French. Here, eggs don’t have white shells!