Hula

By Lisa Shea

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393035891
• ISBN13: 9780393035896
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Profoundly human, insidiously honest...

This is a book I constantly buy and give to others, starting with my sisters. Sensitive and spot on, this is a tale of the modern family gone awry as seen through the eyes of two sister trying to grow up in spite of their circumstance. Their story unfolds as if accidentally. A truly brilliant book. Those of us from less than perfect childhoods will see our experiences here and will cringe with the recognition.

Is it a novel or a poem?

Lisa Shea's Hula is one of the finest miniature novels I've read. In fact, it's the only book that I ever began re-reading seconds after I turned over the last page.Shea's prose is spare and evocative; her story is both beautiful and frightening. I've never read a novel before that seemed so much like a poem. Not because the language was "poetic," but because the book is so beautifully condensed, and it moves from one enigmatic and startling image to the next.I keep buying copies of this book, and I keep giving them to friends.

The best book of realistic childhood I have ever read.

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.

a disturbing and attractive book

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.

wonderful,amazingly accurate acount of girlhood,textural

I read this book in one sitting. She captures the smells, feeling, fears of young girls in the hot summer. Read it