[In the following, Dockrell offers praise for Hula, discussing Shea's focus on victimization, abuse, and male-female relationships.]

"Nothing will catch you. Nothing will let you go." So Lisa Shea warns us as she quotes Jorie Graham's Tennessee June in the epigraph to her first novel, Hula. Appropriate as it is, this signpost only hints at the netherworld that lies ahead, a limbo-like place where hiding becomes a high-stakes game of survival. It is a world of stark contrasts—light and darkness, flowers and ash, innocence and loss. It is a fear-filled place where fantasy is not just the stuff of childhood but a bridge to safety. It is sensuous, harrowing and mesmerizing.

In this slim volume, two sisters come of age in mid-1960s Virginia in the prison that is their back yard. Over the course of two steamy summers, the younger sister narrates as she and her sibling try to stay one step ahead of their war-damaged father and his unpredictable rages, while their shadowy mother, a former dance teacher, drifts ever further into the background.

To the narrator, who remains nameless, as do the others in the family, the father is an alien: "In the back of his head is a hole where no hair grows. Where no hair grows there is a metal plate attached to his head. In the sun, light strikes the metal plate like signals from a flying saucer." Indeed, he is unknowable and dangerous, punching his head with his fists, shooting up the back yard after a drink-filled day with a war buddy, donning a gorilla head and hands before driving off in the car. He metes out severe punishments for his daughters' smallest crimes, whipping them with a rope belt, burning the hula skirts in which they try to dance as their mother once did.

Faced with such horrendous abuse, the younger sister escapes into make-believe as she hides in the forsythia bushes, or on top of the garage, or in the ditch where her father burns everything from trash to the corpse of a puppy hit by a car. While in the shadows, she sets the world right, bravely transforming her parents into the king and queen or imagining great escapes in the burnt-out car at the end of the driveway. Her sister is both accomplice and enemy: In her emerging sexuality, she straddles the worlds of children and women, content with girls' games one day, contemptuous of them the next. Full of the false confidence of early adolescence, she teases her sexually innocent sister to the point of torment.

The only unwavering ally left to the narrator is the family dog, Mitelin, who literally protects the child as she pulls the dog's warm, scent-filled body on top of her, a shield. Mother of the dead puppy, Mitelin becomes something of a stand-in parent, patiently "dancing" in the girl's hula skirt and enduring the stifling heat of the car as they make their fanciful getaways. Mitelin is beloved in all her simplicity: "I smooth the fur on Mitelin's leg and put my hand in between the top of her haunch and her ribs. It is my favorite part of her except for the bump at the top of her head." There is an intimacy and poignancy to this relationship that makes the parents' wrongs all the more devastating.

Besides the wounded father, the other men in the novel are equally malevolent or deficient in some way. There is Ed Riley, a simple man who comes to mow the lawn and stutters when asked about the mother he reputedly never had; there is John Guidry, a tubercular alcoholic who passes out after drinking all day in the back yard; there is a chain gang of convicts who come to repair the road as the sisters watch transfixed; there are Frankie Blackmore and Duane Shields, neighborhood teen-agers who alternately lure and menace the girls with their aggressive sexuality. As the narrator says, "If you don't do what boys want, they can make you do it anyway."

This dark force of male power and inadequacy further imprisons the girls; nowhere is there a strong woman to help set them free. Only when faced with life-threatening violence does the mother mobilize herself enough to remove the children to their ultimate hiding place.

Shea's story can be taken as a parable about the price women have had to pay to coexist with men, but it is bigger than that, an exploration of the dangers inherent in growing up and what we must do to stay alive. The author's sensitive protagonist learns that this gets no simpler as we get older, that sex complicates things exponentially. Eavesdropping on a conversation between her mother and a friend, she observes: "I think [Mrs. Palmer] is a bad influence, not because she taught our mother how to smoke and dye her hair or because she wants her to leave our father…. I think Mrs. Palmer is a bad influence because she makes leaving seem like it is easy."

From the beginning, Shea establishes a tension that builds almost unbearably as the novel progresses. She achieves this in part through the oddly distant first-person telling of the story; the girl's blunt, childlike recording of horrific events, interspersed with her descriptions of the pent-up, overheated atmosphere, pulls her back from the action while drawing us closer to it. Shea's taut prose further adds to the story's power as she paints vivid pictures stripped of all but the barest essentials. The chapters are numerous and episodic: Each is a self-contained entity, with no conventional transitions; instead the narrative is held together by a string of significant events that the younger sister recalls repeatedly. At times this approach is jarring, but mostly it works. This is how children see the world.

The emotional chaos and pain-filled terrain of Hula continue to linger in this reader's memory, in no small part because Shea so deftly captures the inchoate and irreparable damage of wars large and small. All are victims here, even the man whose tyranny is not quite of this world: "When our father comes near me, I slide down under the table, but he pulls me back up by his hairy rubber hands. I don't say anything. He likes being the gorilla. After dinner, when he takes off the mask and hands, his face will be flushed and there will be tears in his eyes."