Byline: AMBER PEARSON AS A child, I secretly suspected that the moment I closed my bedroom door behind me, my toys would spring to life (only to hurriedly return to their places when I walked back in). I can't have been...

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A middle-aged neurotic who is drinking herself blind in squalid solitude begins a journal (as a kind of therapy, of course). Wanna read it? No? I thought not. It's hard to get past the opening pages of the dismal confessions of Lynne Reid Banks's heroine [of "Children at the Gate"] without concluding that her Gerda is that poor girl of everyone's acquaintance who has lost her child and husband, and now just wants to die, and goes out into the street without combing her hai...

A Londoner of Scotch-Irish background, Lynne Reid Banks shares a lot of the virtues of her British contemporaries, such younger women novelists as Margaret Drabble and Maureen Duffy. Like theirs, her work concerns the lives of young, middle-class British women who, though rather surprisingly apolitical to American eyes, are searching for new life styles that will free them from the joyless patterns of current bourgeois family life. There is a solid, open toughness about their styles, and an unsparing, almos...

As anyone knows who has followed Lynne Reid Banks further than The L-Shaped Room, her passionate involvement with Israel became and remains a constant literary theme—indeed, Defy the Wilderness is a fictional by-product of historical research into the first Arab-Israeli war. If it sounds disparaging to call a powerful and professional novel a "by-product", the author can be blamed, for telling us about its conception, and still more for clarifying in the first few pages precisely how we...