Books: Disorder and Early Sorrow

CHILDREN, YOU ARE VERY LITTLE by Betsy Drake Grant. 245 pages. Afheneum. $6.95.

Movie stars who write are like statues that bleed—highly suspect. But Betsy Drake, a minor star of the late '40s (Deep Are the Roots) who spent the '50s as Mrs. Gary Grant, has produced in Children, You Are Very Little a first novel with flair and ferocity.

Her subject, an unhappy childhood, is a certified Freudian yawn, but she plays it for funny and painful surprises. More like Little Lulu than Little Nell, her 10-year-old heroine Lucia refuses to let grownups run and ruin her life. When her parents fight,...