Big Chief
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.
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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.
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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.
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