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 hair.

But wait—there is something else. Our woeful lady is far from the scene of her disasters (in her case, Toronto). We find her in a fly-filled room in Acco, a small coastal town in modern Israel. Her only friend—yes, after all, she does have one—is an Arab house-painter who visits her, nurses her and offers unsurprising advice: "You must take...