Hula [Paperback]

Lisa Shea (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1994

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 155 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 3rd edition (January 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393035891
• ISBN-13: 978-0393035896
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,166,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book of realistic childhood I have ever read., January 9, 1999

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[e-mail] (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hula (Paperback)

I bought hula off a table without thinking anything else about it but a simple summer read to pass time. It is by far one of the best books I have ever read. I think Lisa Shea's imagery of childhood is wonderful and almost disturbing. It makes one remember long since forgotten incidents and occurences of childhood. Brilliant.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a disturbing and attractive book, August 27, 1998

By 

Eckhard A. Gerdes "Eckhard Gerdes" (Illinois) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hula (Paperback)

Lisa Shea's novel explores further many of the themes she established with her brilliant earlier short fiction. There is something in reading her work which is akin to seeing the beauty of a hurricane destroying everything in its path.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hula is Great...but where ARE you, Lisa Shea?, October 13, 2000

By 

"shomezahog" (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hula (Paperback)

I read Hula a few years ago, and I was looking around on Amazon to see if Shea had written anything else. Hula was such a great read that I want more from this twisted, talented author. Shea captures the story in small moments rather than lengthy, descriptive prose. The characters, especially the father (an incredibly disturbed man suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) are sometimes difficult to understand, because Shea leaves enough to the imagination to make you wonder...this is a great book for people who do not need their literature spoon-fed to them.