[Krist is a prizewinning American short story writer. In the mixed review below, he praises Shea's focus on child abuse and survival in Hula, but faults her use of a child as a narrator.]

Children, like many other small, apparently fragile creatures of nature, are actually great geniuses of survival. Forced to live in a world dominated by larger and more powerful animals, they learn to retreat to the inconspicuous corners of an unfriendly situation—accommodating the whims of the reigning bully, cultivating unobtrusiveness, vanishing when danger threatens only to re-emerge when the blustering of giants is past. Circumstances that would paralyze the average adult with despondency won't necessarily defeat a child, who doesn't labor under the same expectations of what life should be. As a result, children can thrive in the most unlikely places—even in that most noxious of environments, the traditional nuclear family.

Certainly the two nameless young girls at the center of Hula, Lisa Shea's terse, meticulously observed first novel, have ample opportunity to refine such psychological survival skills. The controlling figure in their 1960's Virginia household—their father, a menacing, periodically hospitalized veteran of precarious sanity—is not exactly what most child psychologists would consider an ideal parent. A man with "a bomb in his head that keeps going off," he is given to bizarre and arbitrary forms of discipline, subjecting his daughters to mock executions, burning their playthings, making the older girl strip naked on the porch and then throwing her clothes into the yard. The girls' mother, meanwhile, provides at best an ineffectual buffer against this abusive behavior, spending much of the book in bed with various ambiguous ailments. It's no wonder the two sisters learn to be invisible.

Invisible to adults, yes, but to each other they have vivid substance, sharing a private life that in its intensity and physicality verges on the erotic. Left largely to their own devices, the two form a kind of grudging alliance, like animals of the same species in the zoo, always snapping at each other in the close quarters of their cage but united by blood against all other species. Together, they manage to invest their joyless surroundings—the oozing sump pump, the forever-burning garbage barrel, the overflowing sewer pipe—with an aura of significance, transforming this suburban bleakness into something rich in possibility, endlessly fascinating and even, in a perverse way, alluring.

Ms. Shea, a widely published freelance writer, renders this closed, ritualistic world with great precision. Few novelists have written more convincingly about the sheer strangeness of the preadolescent mind, how artfully it sublimates abuse and early sexual feelings, incorporating them into the realm of play. To her credit, she doesn't dwell on obvious, overfamiliar escape fantasies, showing instead how dreams of flight are only one part of the girls' unconscious strategy for salvaging a normal childhood from such unpromising wreckage.

But her novel suffers, I believe, from a lack of authorial stance. Ms. Shea clings so insistently to the limited perspective of her narrator, the younger sister, that too much of the action plays out as raw image and impression, presented without the intellectual penetration required for readers to see beneath the surface of all these carefully hewn details. As a result, many of the secondary characters seem opaque or merely undeveloped: the mother a cipher, the father little more than a blur of indiscriminate malevolence. The reality of these and other characters doesn't seem to extend beyond the younger sister's narrow perceptions.

Ms. Shea has set a difficult challenge for herself: to remain loyal to the consciousness of a narrator too young and inexperienced to appreciate, even remotely, what is happening to her. Other writers—Deborah Eisenberg, Pat Barker, Kaye Gibbons—have managed to pull off the trick, filtering a story through the restricted vision of a child while at the same time conveying the sense of a more complex drama underneath. But Ms. Shea, I feel, hasn't succeeded at suggesting a novel's worth of depth below her book's graphic particulars.

And so Hula never becomes anything more than a series of fragments, vignettes. The inevitable, confrontation between the girls' father and mother—the culminating moment of the novel—lacks impact, not only because it is a collision between two such sketchy figures but also because the narrator and the author both seem to accept it all so passively, without judgment or reflection. By the epilogue, I found myself wishing Ms. Shea had dug deeper to provide more of a context in which her own insight and outrage could inform the story. As it is, Hula reveals her to be a strikingly gifted writer, but one whose talents deserve a larger, more ambitious showcase.