November 1, 2024
Hickey, an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, debuts with the story of Mitch Caddo and Mack Beck, who run the government of the Passage Rouge Nation and the tribe's casino. Their power is put in doubt, and an all-out political fight sets the stage for multiple realizations, about limits, costs, and, ultimately, bonds. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
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March 1, 2025
Hickey's polished debut novel takes place in a few fraught days preceding an election at the fictional Passage Rouge Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin. The novel's narrator, 30-year-old Mitch Caddo, is attempting to help his childhood friend Mack win reelection as tribal president against Gloria, an activist and best-selling memoirist. Mitch, an Ivy League-educated lawyer, spent a few years of his childhood and adolescence on the reservation but moved around often with his single mom, leaving him feeling like a perpetual outsider and a "suburban Indian." His mission to support Mack, about which he already has serious doubts, is further undermined by a series of protests, the objections of Mack's father (and Mitch's sole father figure), an FBI investigation, and Mitch's desire to win back his childhood sweetheart, Layla, who works for Gloria. At its heart, 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.
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