After I finished the first chapter, I put it down to go to bed thinking "this could be the book of the year, it's funny, insightful, hits the right notes." And then I read on.

That initial voice was lost. It's a really windy story which gets quite bogged down. I got a ARC from Netgalley. It doesn't come out till next spring, it would be nice if there was time in that for another edit. At it's root it's a really good story with a lot of soul but it gets so bogged down and the pacing is all off. If I had to read another description of the Big Chief... There needed one more edit to say focus less on the politics and main characters and more on the interactions with the tribe and others. The interactions with people outside the inner circle were so much more interesting. The Inner Circle was just all anger and alpha-male posturing. The thin threads he presents for friendship with them are weak.

I wanted to like the narrator but he didn't really show his real cards much. I still have no clue why he became a politico past a quick comment, what he felt about the tribe and his relation to it, and so many other things. When I was in my 20s, I was a politco and I get you think it's the right thing to do but get disillusioned but he ignored all those things.

They say for ARCs you don't comment on typos, but in two chapters in a row, someone walks in, sits down, says something, and then walks in again. There were other continuity errors like this throughout. The whole thing just needed another edit before going to ARCs. And the names! Sometimes the family is called the Becks, sometimes the Plums. If the Plums is a nickname, it was never explained. After awhile I shrugged and figured I missed something. There was much I missed- why was Mack so angry? Why was he raised by the Becks? Why was he what he was- I guess he needed more story to make him more than a big angry bull.

Hickey regains his voice at the end, the last chapter is almost magical. I just wish he hadn't lost his way in between.

Life is complicated, especially, when you are trying to find the place to call home, and then mix in politics, corruption, grief and family, it becomes very complicated. Jon Hickey's Big Chief, spans the days leading up to a tribal presidential election, while also providing the back story between the characters.

Mitch Caddo, a budding political fixer, is trying to get his candidate and long time friend Mack re-elected as tribal president. He is also dealing with the opposition candidate, tribal elders, corruption, former relationships, and most importantly the grief over his biological mother's death and the death of his mentor/father figure. It's a boiling pot on the verge of boiling over.

While it was a little confusing to figure out who everyone was and their relationship to each other, the characters, were very well written and developed. It was a very captivating story, and I highly recommend it.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with this ARC and opportunity to read and review.

Big Chief is a story that centers around Mitch, the right-hand-man/“fixer” of the Tribal President of Passage Rouge Nation, Mack. Mitch and Mack were childhood friends and Mitch has stood behind Mack’s shady practices for years. This story takes place in the week leading up to the next election, which is not in Mack’s favor. This book isn’t what I thought- I expected more of a political page-turner, but it’s really a literary character study of Mitch. While I enjoyed this book, the story arc felt lacking to me- I often didn’t have a sense of where the story was progressing. I think this book would have benefited from covering a longer time period, rather than just a week, so there could be more character development and more plot points. Overall though, I did enjoy this book and I’m glad I read it!

I really liked this book. The description of “The Night Watchmen” meets “There, There” grabbed my attention. I did confused about the character families the Plums and the Becks. It wasn’t until much later I realized the adoption and connection. Could probably use some better clarification if editing is still occurring. Anyways, I really liked the complexity of Mitch and his relationship with Joe and his mom. I would definitely recommend this and think it could do well.

Politics, power, corruption, complicated family ties, loyalty, and grief. A meaningful conversation about rez life and a search for purpose. I loved it.

Big Chief (Coming April 2025)
By Jon Hickey
Simon and Schuster, 320 pages.
★★★★

Big Chief is about Native Americans, though the title refers to a fortress-like Ford Super-Duty F-350 truck designed to impress and intimidate. Jon Hickey's novel takes place on the Passage Rouge reservation in Wisconsin, which sports a contentious community of Anishinaabeg (Chippewa) people. It's Thanksgiving time and an election for tribal chief looms.

Many non-native peoples valorize all things Native American. Hickey–like writers such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Tommy Orange, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Morgan Talty–reminds us that homegrown discontents run rampant in indigenous communities. Mack Beck, who drives Big Chief, is the incumbent Passage Rouge chief but faces stiff opposition from Gloria Hawkins. His advisor, 30-year-old Mitch Caddo is the book’s centerpiece. Mitch is native and the youngest operations director in tribal history, yet an outsider. His mother grew up in Old Village, the original Passage Rouge Settlement, but his white father’s shortcomings led mother and son to flee to Milwaukee. Upon her death Mitch was raised by grandparents before Joe and Maureen Beck, who are white, brought him back to Passage Rouge and provided him opportunities.

The Becks live on a nicer property than most of their Native neighbors, and raised Mack–and later, Mitch–alongside their biological daughter Layla. Joe knows tribal history and rituals better than most Anishinaabeg, passes on his knowledge, and has done numerous good things for the reservation. For Mitch that’s a mixed blessing. He loves Joe and Maureen, but his mixed blood status, polished manners, Ivy League education, years off the reservation, and law degree make him an outlier.

In many ways, Mitchell, Gloria, and Joe are living embodiments of central dilemmas in the novel. Who is a native? If it's solely a matter of blood, how much? Being “red” is up for grabs in Passage Rouge, a place filled with HUD houses, rivalries, an increasingly militarized tribal police force, and a casino that attracts outsiders when it's not being used as makeshift community center. Mack fancies himself a reformer, but has fallen into some negative old-school ways. Mitch can’t get Mack to realize that Gloria is a serious candidate and that he can’t count on winning by handing out allotment checks, cigarettes, and selective favors or getting heavy-handed when needed. Mitch holds progressive views, but these often clash with running Mack’s campaign. How hard can he push Mack if he wants to remain a political player?

You might wonder why anyone would want to be a player at Passage Rouge. Its politics are like a casino game rigged so that no one wins. You name it and there's a faction for it on the reservation: modernizers, an old boys network, do-gooders, grafters, those who wish to revive old tribal customs, city Indians, reservation Indians…. Not to mention romantic rivalries, some of which revolve around the independent and opinionated Layla. She has moved on from her marriage to Chief of Police Bobby Lone Eagle, who remains territorial and acts like Little Big Man. The reservation is so riven that many speak openly of weaponizing tactics of un-enrolling those who don’t measure up to their particular definition of “Indian” and of exiling non-natives.

About the only thing resembling consensus is that few on the reservation trust the government–though many tout their military service and rely upon those allotment checks–and don't want the Department of Justice poking into tribal matters. In such a volatile moment of stress, all that's needed is for someone to light a fuse. Protests, kidnapping, a fatal accident, threats, and a shooting raise different questions about what is meant by Indian blood.

Hickey's novel is multilayered. It grapples with very serious identity issues, yet is also shot through with humor. It is about justice in a place in which injustices of all sorts swirl about. It's a romance, but not a conventional one, a murder mystery, and a heroic tale filled with flawed and questionable candidates for said status.

One might say that Hickey overdoes rushing from crisis-to-crisis scenarios, but he keeps the pace moving, and presents modern Anishinaabeg life stripped of stereotypes. This is Hickey's first novel and if Big Chief is any indication, the first of many fine books to come.

Rob Weir

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

I really enjoyed this book. It kept me engaged and it only took a few days to read. I think this is going to be a good book club option for several clubs. I plan recommending to my book friends and I look forward to reading more by this author.

This book is propulsive yet internal. Language is lovely. An interesting look into a tribal election.

Mitch Caddo straddles the world of Native American reservation life and that of the white man's world. After law school, he returned to the Nation and began assisting his childhood friend with building political power and becoming the Tribal Chief. As the behind -the -scenes guy, "The Fixer" Mitch isn't sure where he actually belongs and where is loyalty should lie.

Hickey draws an engrossing story of politics and community with the powerful forces of home, belonging, ethnicity woven in.
#simonandschuster #bigchief #jonhickey

I enjoyed reading this book as an insight into tribal reservation life and how it can affect the people who are a part of it. I connected with Mitch who seemingly was just looking for a place to call home. And by wanting to belong somewhere, he puts his morals and values to the test. The outcome of his trials and tribulations helped him learn how to be the man he wanted to be.

It's kind of like "Succession" on the rez--political intrigue, family loyalty and individual aspirations, backstabbing and rumor mongering. I liked it.

I was looking forward to reading Jon Hickey’s debut novel, “The Big Chief,” because it seemed intriguing as it portrays the life of an Indian tribe in Wisconsin and I am always interested in learning about different cultures. Unfortunately, as explained more fully below, the book did not live up to my expectations. It didn’t seem to have much of a plot, if any, and the story was somewhat monotonous and repetitive.

The book’s protagonist, Mitch Caddo, is the attorney and political advisor for his childhood best friend, Mack Beck, who is the current Tribal President and is running for reelection employing any means necessary to win including banishing people from the tribe so they can’t vote. Mitch has lived in Mack’s shadow since childhood when Mack protected Mitch from bullies. As an adult, Mitch continues to be subsumed by Mack’s more powerful personality, following Mack’s orders even when they seem morally questionable. Although Mitch frequently feels disgust at himself for his part in enabling Mack’s actions he seems powerless to object or stand up to him.

The prose had a lyrical, literary quality to it and the characters, although not very likable, were nuanced and well drawn. However, the story itself was not very engaging. It consisted of a lot of internal monologues on the part of Mitch, filled with self-doubt and self-loathing, along with dialogs between him and various other characters about the upcoming tribal election, all of which became somewhat monotonous. Nothing really happens until halfway through the book when Mitch’s mentor, who is Mack’s adopted father, dies in what appears to be an accident, but could have been suicide with hints that someone had a hand in the “accident”. But even that event becomes anti-climactic as the specific cause of the supposed accident is never revealed. There were also numerous protests regarding the pending election held in front of the Government Center, but these too became all too frequent and tedious. And as mentioned previously it was hard to care what happened to the characters as they were not very likable.

Although the book did not appeal to me, perhaps other readers will find the themes more interesting and will also enjoy the well drawn characters and the literary style of the writing.
Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for providing me an ARC of the novel in exchange for my honest review.

This book was just okay. I read it quickly, but it seemed like not too much was going on while at the same time a whole lot of extra was going on.

Big Chief was different from anything I have ever read before, perhaps because I don't often read novels about political intrigue, unless they are also science fiction or fantasy. Big Chief deals with tribal politics, and its events are almost entirely confined to the week leading up to the tribe's presidential election. The author, debut novelist Jon Hickey, makes the brilliant decision of focusing the story on the reelection campaign following two years in office. We slowly learn more about how the idealism of the first campaign has given way to political corruption, resentments, and opportunism.

This is a subtle novel in many ways, though the parallels between the microcosm of the tribal election and the national US political moment were anything but. The subtleties come instead in its characterizations, particularly of its biracial protagonist, Mitch, and his relationship to his tribe and to his white adopted father and career mentor.

The protagonist (or perhaps a bit of an antihero) is slippery. I found it hard to get a handle on him, but I also got the sense he didn't quite understand himself, or was unwilling to fully confront the reality of his self, and so this was the point. Things seem to happen to Mitch, and yet we know both from others and his own (somewhat begrudgingly given) account that he is a schemer, the man behind the mirror of the actual tribal president, his childhood friend Mack. Mitch is first and foremost among the complex characters of the novel's cast--among which there are very few truly good people, despite all of their many good intentions.

The novel does contain frank depictions of political and police violence. Yet, these moments never felt gratuitous, but only inevitable, the mark of a truly well-executed plot. I was not always sure what to think about Big Chief while reading it, but the more I sit with the novel, the more I like it. I hope others do as well.

Mitch has a law a law degree that he’s using for his Nation’s political candidate as Tribal president. He’s about to confront hard choices as the climate of the upcoming election forces him to choose where his loyalties lie. The setting in inhospitable northern Wisconsin is completely foreign to me. Having read several multicultural stories who’s focus was native tribes, I always gain insight to the culture. There are power struggles with a constant threat of being thrown out, disenrolled or banishments as a member of the tribe based on proof of lineage. Crime, poverty and drugs live beside the massive Casino, fancy cars and ornate estates. Mitch must face his childhood best friend, his feelings for the woman he still loves, while dealing with politics, corruption, protests and unrest. The tension of the story builds as events unfold. His perception of his lifelong mentor is upended. It’s a powerful story of friendship, family, loyalty and finding your calling in life. While there were many takeaways the one that stood out for me was be careful who your heroes are. No matter their status, intelligence or accolades they’re human just like you. The story made me feel desolate, it’s depressing to visualize the ongoing struggles within tribal settlements.
Simon & Schuster (via NetGalley) provided an Advance Reader Copy of “Big Chief” by Jon Hickey, publication expected 04/08/2025. These are my honest, personal thoughts and opinions given voluntarily without compensation.