Deborah Blau's psychosis—the focus of ["I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"]—is the flowering, in the second American-born generation, of her family's social and domestic pathology. The illness is, at the same time, an expedient, for survival amid the contradictions with which her inherited world is furnished, and an irrationally cunning search for the mental health which would be a fit culmination of a flight from the Old World to the New….

In mid-adolescence, the other world, which [Deborah] calls Yr, is ready to receive her. She has no language left to protest her half-chosen abduction into this glamorous and tormenting world except an attempt at suicide. The present drama of the novel begins when her parents are forced to interpret this bloody appeal correctly and take her to a mental hospital.

In the hospital, Deborah's symptoms get spectacularly worse…. When standard therapies are of no avail, she is transferred to a "locked ward" reserved for the most disturbed patients. Only the stalwart and wise Dr. Fried refuses to concede that her symptoms are a true index of the progress of the disease. The doctor discerns a will to survive still actively frustrating Deborah's attempts at mental and physical self-destruction. And from this tap root of hidden strength the hard work of doctor and patient at last induces a growth that desperately seeks the living weather of reality.

Hannah Green (a pseudonym …) has done a marvelous job of dramatizing the internal warfare in a young psychotic. She has anatomized, in full detail, the relationship between a whole, sick human being and the clinical situation—including doctors, other patients and the abstract forces of institutional life. With a courage that is sometimes breathtaking in its concessions—in its serene acceptance of risks—the author makes a faultless series of discriminations between the justifications for living in an evil and complex reality and the justifications for retreating into the security of madness. One surrenders to the authority of Miss Green's thematic statement because she has foreseen, admitted and passed beyond all the major objections that might be made to it.

Yet, convincing and emotionally gripping as this novel is, it falls a little short of being fictionally convincing. Our attention is fixed on the roles played by the characters rather than on their essential humanity. We are made to care whether the doctor will succeed as doctor, whether the patient will successfully overcome her illness, while the real fictional question of the cost and value of such successes is ultimately slighted. It is as if some wholly admirable, and yet specialized, nonfictional discipline has been dressed in the garments and mask of fiction. The reader is certainly not cheated by this imposition—nor is he truly satisfied.