Hula — Lisa Shea

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.