From Publishers Weekly
In her remarkable first novel, Shea hauntingly evokes the spirits and sensations of childhood. The lives of two sisters at the crossroads between childhood and adolescence are described in lyrical, hypnotic prose. Set in the early 1960s, nearly all the action takes place in the backyard of the girls' suburban Virginia home, to them a surreal, adventurous place in which they act out their wishes, hopes and dreams, and try to cope--often ritualistically--with family dysfunction. Their father, whose mind has been ravaged by war, is given to drunken gunplay and sudden explosions of rage. Their mother is whimsical and distant; the marriage is disintegrating. The girls are forced back upon their inner resources and each other for a sense of security. Convincingly portraying the budding sexuality of early adolescence in sometimes shocking situations, Shea re-creates the numinous landscape of childhood in which animals and vegetation possess immanent intelligence and personality. The nameless terrors in their home life counterpoints the irrepressible optimism that is native to childhood and that, Shea implies, can see children safely through the grimmest of circumstances, such as the searing climax of this quiet, expertly told novel. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This tale of the conflict between two sisters in the early 1960s marks the fiction debut of a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in such wide-ranging publications as Esquire , the New York Times Book Review , and People.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review
A strikingly gifted writer.


The New Yorker
The tenacity of the narrator and the imaginative resources she brings to bear on day-to-day survival literally make you ache.


From Booklist
The family members remain nameless in this claustrophobic and often cryptic tale, an anonymity that lends a certain mythic terror to events and personalities. The father, a violent and crazy man, is a war casualty with a metal plate in the back of his head that glints ominously in the harsh Virginia sunlight. His two daughters, the prepubescent narrator who clings to her dog for comfort, and her often jeering and tentatively lascivious older sister, take out their fears and anger on dolls, mangling them and stuffing their body parts down a drainpipe. The mother, a former dance teacher fond of the hula, is an elusive and unhelpful presence. There are many similarities between Shea's first novel and Elizabeth Berg's lyrical Durable Goods , another tale of two sisters abused by a mentally disturbed father, but Shea's is by far the darker and more surreal and mysterious of the two, a curiously unsettling and indelible creation. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Tiny, lucid first novel about two girls who navigate the shoals of puberty--and escape the dangers of a terrible, mean, cruel father. In a wry but deadpan voice, the younger of two sisters (the older is getting breasts) narrates the events of the summers of 1964 and 1965, when the girls' parents at last split up. Mother teaches dance at a local studio, and father, with a shiny metal plate in the back of his head (``My mother says something happened to our father in the war but my sister says he is just mean''), hangs around the house and yard in a state of barely suppressed rage, often being cruel, sometimes drinking too much (this makes him prone to shoot his pistol), and on occasion (as at the end, when he attempts to kidnap his daughters) flying into real, wild violence. As the storm of their repressive father's irrationality slowly brews, the girls live their own carefully guarded, small, private lives, sneaking swims in a neighbor's above-ground pool (it has slugs in it), quarreling endlessly (along with scratches and punches), escaping on pretend-journeys in the burned-out car on the lawn (where their father sometimes sleeps, his feet sticking out the window), and stealing away at night to meet up with local boys. There's a small dog that adds a droll and often touching humor, an eerie episode of a sheep (father kills and then burns it), and a once-pet rabbit that lost its tail and now keeps to itself, though never going far from the yard (``Lily is wild but she is still ours''). Father's kidnap attempt, with car and gun and bullets and daughters, is, like everything else here, skillfully understated and vividly told. Small, spare pleasures aplenty, albeit in a tale as worn and familiar as a soft old glove. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Francine Prose
Sophisticated and shockingly pure, artful and seemingly artless....I have never read anything quite like it.


Kaye Gibbons
What a finely tuned and frighteningly real version of an American childhood!


Boston Sunday Globe
Sensuous, harrowing and mesmerizing...from the beginning, she a establishes a tension that builds almost unbearably as the novel progress.


Elle
An example of that rarity, an authentic child's voice...haunting, poetic...


Review
"The tenacity of the narrator and the imaginative resources she brings to bear on her day-to-day survival literally make you ache." -- The New Yorker

"Sensuous, harrowing and mesmerizing...from the beginning, she a establishes a tension that builds almost unbearably as the novel progress." -- Boston Sunday Globe

"An example of that rarity, an authentic child's voice...haunting, poetic...shimmering self-enclosed chapters that when viewed as a team read like an act of magic." -- Elle

"Sophisticated and shockingly pure, artful, and seemingly articles, Hula says things that we recognize from experience about the secret world of little girls hurtling out of childhood. I have never read anything like it."-- Francine Prose

"A strikingly gifted writer."-- The New York Times Book Review


Book Description
For two young girls in the 1960s, the family backyard is both playground and prison. Among the bushes and brambles, it offers places to hide from the rages of their war-scarred father, places that also become secret gardens of the imagination. Told over the course of two hot Virginia summers, Hula presents a child's-eye view of a family drama played out to a chilling climax. The younger sister narrates, introducing us to her older sister's ritual taunts, her mother's dreamy distance, her father's escalating temper. Lisa Shea's haunting first novel probes the dark place where adolescent fantasies and real terrors collide.


From the Publisher
Lisa Shea's award-winning first novel immediately established her as an all-important American talent and made her a #1 regional best-selling author. The hardcover publication of Hula brought author Lisa Shea a Whiting Writers Award, put her in the company of other Whiting winners such as Tobias Wolff, Alice McDermoft, and Mona Simpson, and made her book a #1 regional best-seller. The recipient of praise rarely showered upon a first novel, Hula is haunting, seductive, and reminiscent of Susan Minot's Monkeys or Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. For two pre-adolescent sisters isolated by their parents' neglect and driven to create their own secret garden of the imagination, their backyard is their universe. Through the hot days of two long summers, the play of the two girls, who are both the closest of allies and the worst of enemies, mirrors the violence of a war-haunted father and the passivity of their emotionally absent mother. But adolescent fantasies and terrors come together when their semi-innocent games are encroached upon by the real world. As one summer gives way to the next, the voyeuristic and at times surreal story, narrated by the younger sister, builds in portent and power as the sisters' sexuality surfaces and their parents' marriage strains toward its inevitable end. "The tenacity of the narrator and the imaginative resources she brings to bear on her day-to-day survival literally make you ache." -- The New Yorker.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For two young girls in the early 1960s, the family backyard is both playground and prison. Steamy, verdant, cloistered - the yard's secret places tantalize the imagination, but also reveal disturbing glimpses of a war-haunted father and dreamy, distant mother. The younger sister narrates, introducing us to her older sister's ritual taunts, her mother's increasing withdrawal, her father's volatile temper. Told over the course of two hot summers, the story builds in power and portent as the girls' sexuality surfaces and the parents' marriage strains toward its end. Voyeuristic, at times surreal, Shea's lyrical first novel probes the dark corner where adolescent fantasies and terrors converge.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kaye Gibbons

What a finely tuned and frighteningly real version of an American childhood!

Francine Prose

Sophisticated and shockingly pure, artful and seemingly artless....I have never read anything quite like it.

New Yorker

The tenacity of the narrator and the imaginative resources she brings to bear on day-to-day survival literally make you ache.

Boston Sunday Globe

Sensuous, harrowing and mesmerizing...from the beginning, she a establishes a tension that builds almost unbearably as the novel progress.

Elle