Maintains a tight time frame, with each of its sections, apart from a brief postscript, devoted to a single day. This helps keep the book on the rails, given the numerous characters and events that fill its pages ... Such events drive the narrative forward, but despite the sound and fury, the novel has a strangely vacant center. This is not inadvertent ... Hickey’s writing can be workmanlike, even awkward ... For the most part, Big Chief cultivates an uneasy atmosphere. Full of cagey, terse, veiled exchanges between people bound together by self-interest who do not seem to like or trust each other much, it creates suspense not from the question of whether open conflict will take place, but when.
What Jon Hickey has created with Big Chief is a masterclass on identity and what it feels like to be at peace within our skin. There is power in those actions ... A dazzling, fast-paced pressure-cooker journey about not letting others define who we are, but rather deciding that for ourselves.
Ambitious ... Cynical and sly, with a pitiless eye for how identity gets deployed ... If the plot seems somewhat unsatisfying, perhaps that’s by design ... At its best, Big Chief illuminates the slushy places where convictions turn into slogans and back again. Hickey is so sure-footed that I’ll follow wherever he goes next.
An entertaining political thriller ... Underneath its suspense and satire is a real understanding of 21st-century Native American experience; Hickey’s depiction of the reality of reservation life eschews stereotypes and caricatures in favor of complex, multifaceted people ...
What really makes Big Chief special, though, is the author’s deep understanding of the complex social, cultural, and legal politics of reservation life ... Big Chief understands the unique double consciousness of what it means to be Native American—the political workings of a tribe, the meaning of belonging under Indian law. But the novel is smart enough to keep all these ideas swirling, using them as the backdrop for an engrossing political thriller.
Showcases Hickey’s intimate understanding of electoral politics, small town corruption, and contested authority within the Anishinaabe reservation of Passage Rouge ... Hickey has found a rich topic in exploring questions of indigenous authenticity. His characters are exiled, accepted and rejected, loved and forgotten ... It’s all interesting fodder for this particular political moment; this is a story about an unapologetically partisan leader who routinely bends or breaks the law in order to enact what he sees as a mandate to deliver a harsh set of populist policies that sow chaos during a particularly vulnerable moment.
Polished ... This is a novel about the difficulties of belonging to a family or a community while plagued by an unsettled conscience and about the ways in which ambition and power can have drastic results on any playing field.
