SOURCE: "Great Plains Tragedies," in The New York Times Book Review, August 12, 1990, p. 16.

In the following review of The Power of Horses, McFall favorably assesses Cook-Lynn's portrayal of the culture-clash between whites and Native Americans.

The poem that serves as a prologue to Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's first collection of short stories [The Power of Horses] signals a unifying thread of her fiction, which depicts the lives of her fellow Sioux in the Great Plains: "The mythology / and history of all times / remains remote / and / believable." With sympathetic characters and stylistic simplicity, Ms. Cook-Lynn reveals the endurance of a people subjected to centuries of "violent diaspora and displacement." The inadequacies of white culture and the damage it has caused within the Native American ethos are glaringly apparent here. In the first story, for example, we see how the English language fails to express Dakota experience and perception. And in the...