A big-minded book about small-town politics.
A fixer for a Native American tribal leader is caught in the drama of a tense election season.
Mitch Caddo, the narrator of Hickey’s assured debut, is 30 years old and introduces himself as “the youngest ever tribal operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe," a Wisconsin tribe with 5,000 enrolled members. It’s a step up from his previous work as a tribal attorney working family-court cases. But as the election for tribal president approaches, he’s torn: He knows that his old friend Mack Beck, the current president, who’s taken up residence in a suite at the local casino hotel, is an incompetent boor, and that Mack’s main political strategy—banishing and disenrolling those who fall into legal trouble and effectively paying off the tribe via annual checks from the general fund—at once weakens and alienates the community. As Mitch does disreputable things on Mack’s behalf, such as creating burner Facebook accounts smearing his opponent, Mitch is prompted to reconsider his past. Joe Beck, who’s the tribal counsel, Mack’s adoptive father, and a mentor to Mitch after his mother’s death, is disappointed in the mudslinging. Mack’s sister, Layla, with whom Mitch had a brief fling, is even more resentful. Keeping the timeframe tight—the story runs from Thanksgiving to the election the following Tuesday—escalates the intensity of a story that includes a plane crash, a community riot, hovering FBI agents, and a police department that’s much too comfortable using military surplus equipment. But most of the tension resides within Mitch, who enters the story with plenty of swagger—“I execute the decisions of a multi-million-dollar corporation that also happens to be a sovereign nation”—while slowly recognizing the perils of his braggadocio. It’s not hard to see the events in this small community as an allegory for larger themes of corruption in the Trump era, but Hickey avoids big symphonic flourishes and instead emphasizes the cost to individuals.
A big-minded book about small-town politics.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668046463
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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