SOURCE: “The Literary Seductions of a Macho Woman,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 10, 1988, p. 12.

In the following review, Jones-Davis praises Harrison's novel Dalva for being a compassionate story with well-drawn characters.

Dalva has kept a light burning in her heart for a dead husband of less than a day; for her father lost in Korea, and most of all, it seems, for the Sioux nation driven out of their rich Nebraska grasslands a century ago. She comes from a family strangely at home among the dead. She's inherited a farmhouse from a beloved grandfather that is more than adjacent to a gardenlike cemetery full of ancestors; in the house itself, death maintains a terrifying, literal presence.

Jim Harrison's new novel, Dalva, is not a story of the supernatural, but it is a tale about ghosts, haunting, about the continuing presence of those departed from this world...