[Rich is an American critic and fiction writer. In the review below, she praises the thematic focus and stylistic features of Hula.]

Lisa Shea is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in several prominent publications; she is the recipient of a 1993 Whiting Writers' Award. There are rumors that Hula is autobiographical, in the way so many first novels are. If this is the case, there's a strong temptation to offer up paeans yet again to the ability of human beings to survive.

The narrator of Hula and her older sister live in a rundown suburb in Virginia; the time is the mid-sixties. The children's mother, who used to be a dancer, and who taught the hula to the girls, is now a passive witness to their abuse, and to the disintegration of her marriage to a man who is, periodically, mad.

One of the telling symptoms of the narrator's separation from any sense of self is that no family names are provided. The children's animals have names: Mitelin, the dog; Max, her puppy; Lily, the mysteriously tailless rabbit. Neighbors, too, have names, but it's "our mother," "our father," "my sister" and "me."

Our father walks down the hill, holding the scythe high above the grass … "What's he doing?" I ask again. My sister pinches me hard on the arm, which means shut up. Now our father is standing in front of the ditch, looking up at the house with the handle of the scythe lifted onto his shoulder. Our mother says our father has a bomb in his head that keeps going off. He has been taken to the hospital a few times but he keeps coming back.

The "bomb" is a metal plate, result of a war wound, that causes the father to commit random—and not so random—acts of abusive violence. The mother, while aware of this, cannot be roused from her beaten-down depression. So the children, one ten and the other pre-adolescent, engage in games: some violent, others self-protective. They watch a chain gang, and choose their "favorite" prisoner to fantasize about. The narrator observes her sister's precocious sexuality, and is torn between fear and jealousy. And they both try to be "invisible" when their father is around; but the narrator succeeds at this better than her sister, remarking at a crucial point, "She'll stick out like she usually does."

One chapter, "Blizzard," takes place during the summer of 1965. It is six pages of inner terror, wrapped up in a game of "pretend." The sisters and Mitelin are on a "journey" in the thick of an imaginary snowstorm, while the heat inside their father's burned-out car, parked on cinder blocks in the yard, grows more intense every minute.

"Where are we going?" I ask my sister. Her arms are crossed and she is staring straight through the space between the dashboard and the steering wheel.

"Away," she says.

"Where?"

"I'll think of a place."

The bogus blizzard reminds the narrator of a real snowstorm, when their mother took them to visit their father during one of his hospitalizations. He refused to see them, and Mitelin ate the entire cake they brought, including the box.

Hula is full of these childish yet old-beyond-their-years revelations, of events that shift from the present to the pitifully recent past. It is Shea's skill in showing chilling happenings so matter-of-factly that infuses and informs this brave, oddly mysterious novel. Which brings one quibble to mind: I wish Shea had been—at selective times—less elliptical, particularly in depicting the mother. Not necessarily a full portrait, but a somewhat clearer sketch …

As I was writing this review, my first visceral reaction to Hula came back, and I was struck by the power of its continuing impact. There is much about it to admire, even down to the cover design—a rear view of two small girls in hula skirts.

Hula is dedicated: "For my sisters." I choose to believe this is more than familial, that Lisa Shea wrote the book for women everywhere whose early years were marked by episodes of bewildering fear and pain, and who remain haunted by them.