If you are having difficulty navigating this website please contact us at member.services@bookofthemonth.com or 1-877-236-8540.

Get your first book for $9.99 with code CHIRP at checkout.

Join today!

We’ll make this quick.

First, enter your email. Then choose your move.

By tapping "Pick a book now" or "Pick a book later", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Freedom's Child by Jax Miller
Thriller

Freedom's Child

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Jax Miller, on your first book!

by Jax Miller

Excellent choice

Just enter your email to add this book to your box.

By tapping "Add to box", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.

Quick take

‘My name is Freedom Oliver and I killed my daughter’ … What follows is perhaps the most satisfying reading experience I've had so far this year.

Why I love it

Old habits die hard, and (caution: here comes TMI), I have a longstanding practice of eating while reading particular literary genres. For instance, I prefer crunching on salty anything for mysteries; sweets for commercial fiction and biographies. However, a few seconds into Freedom’s Child and I dropped my bag of kettle chips and never went back to them again.

The opening lines of Jax Miller's knockout debut thriller fed my hunger instead: "My name is Freedom Oliver and I killed my daughter. It's surreal, honestly, and I'm not sure what feels more like a dream, her death or her existence. I'm guilty of both." What follows is perhaps the most satisfying reading experience I've had so far this year.

Freedom, a bartender and a self-described "murderer, cop killer, fugitive, and drunk," pours potent drinks as customers in Painter, Oregon, spill their sins to her. What the patrons don't know is that Freedom is full of her own secrets too. For starters, the ink-stained redhead is living under a Witness Protection Program for killing her abusive, police officer husband. Now, Matthew, Freedom's sleazebag former brother-in-law, has just been released from prison and is looking to avenge his sibling's murder. To lure Freedom out of hiding, Matthew uses the toughest line of bait to tug on Freedom's hardened heartstrings: the two grown children she gave up for adoption long ago.

What's a woman to do? For Freedom, that means hopping on her Harley-Davidson to protect her shattered family. What's a reader to do? Sit back and enjoy a wild ride through America's rusty, neglected back roads, where loners and hitchhikers have created an informal economy with its own bizarre rites and rules. This razor-sharp journey is littered with some shady and scary characters including bad-to-the-bone bikers, an apocalyptic cult, and a 600-pound, cocaine peddling mean mama who wants to take Freedom out, for good. That we care more deeply about Freedom through each of these dizzying and dangerous encounters makes Miller's audacious first novel that much more remarkable.

Read less

Create a free account!

Sign up to see book details, our quick takes, and more.

By tapping "Sign up", you agree to Book of the Month’s Terms of use and Privacy policy.