SOURCE: A review of From the River's Edge, in The New York Times Book Review, September 8, 1991, p. 35.

In the following review of From the River's Edge, Houston examines Cook-Lynn's literary style and technique.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's From the River's Edge is a short novel both noble in intent and complex in concept. It is so heavily flawed in its execution, however, that ultimately neither intent nor concept can rescue it from its inability to maintain the "vivid and continuous dream" that the novelist John Gardner rightly named as the special reality of fiction. Ms. Cook-Lynn, a respected Native American studies scholar who has previously published a collection of stories (The Power of Horses and Other Stories) and two collections of poems, apparently has yet to make the leap from the language and approach of scholarly writing and polemic to the more complicated craft of novel writing.

The time is...