HULA (First Edition)

Over the course of two hot summers, two sisters growing up in the 1960s with a war-haunted father and a withdrawn mother, discover their sexuality and see their parents' marriage disintegrate

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.

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.

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

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.