[Here, Houppert provides a favorable assessment of Hula.]

Two girls sit on the front steps of their house watching the arrival of a storm while their parents fight inside, angry voices clearly audible. Their father's voice is "the thunder getting closer," their mother's "the wind shaking the pointy leaves of the mimosa tree." The narrator, a girl of about 10, has no shirt on because her volatile father has chased her suddenly from the house. Her older sister—12?—looks at the girl's bare chest. "Cover yourself," she says. The narrator answers: "I don't have anything."

So opens Lisa Shea's harrowing novel, Hula. Truly this young narrator has nothing to hide behind; the shame implied in covering up remains for her an adult convention. And while she doesn't shy from baring her stark world—isn't everyone's family just like mine?—it is her and her sister's skill at concealment that protects them from their father's wrath. Camouflaged beneath the mimosa branches, flat against the garage roof, beneath the porch, the two pubescent girls peer out at their world.

This short first novel takes place over two summers, during which the sisters are largely confined to the backyard. Their mother, trapped in a bad marriage, is depressed and distant. Their father, a severely disturbed veteran with a penchant for bonfires, is constantly burning whatever he finds disagreeable, from the dog's chew-bones to the girls' hula skirts to one of their puppies, Jupiter, killed by a passing car. The narrator and her sister crawl beneath the forsythia bushes or hide in the drainage ditch, fearful that the ashes coating everything might be Jupiter.

My sister picks up a handful and sifts it through her fingers.

"Jupiter," I tell her.

"Jupiter is in the ground," my sister says.

"He might be in the air."

"He went down," she says.

She throws the ash away. I close my eyes so a speck won't fly in. It might be Jupiter.

The sisters gravitate toward and away from each other in a painfully genuine leave-me-alone/where-are-you? relationship. And yet the narrator, frightened by her own, but mostly by her older sister's, emerging sexuality, clings to her one and only ally. Ordered to the car by their mother—domestic disputes often end with fast getaways—the girls sit.

"How long do we have to wait?" I ask my sister.

"Until," says my sister.

"Until when?" I want to know.

"Until you shut up!" she yells…. After a while, I reach for my sister's blond ponytail and hold it. She doesn't tell me to let go, so I keep holding it while the night comes down around the house and the trees and bushes and the car.

Sometimes cruelty makes its way into their games. They whip each other with forsythia branches, play "torture" by hanging naked from the branches of a tree where they pretend to be beaten until their "pinks" rise. From a second-story window they aim a real gun at their father's head. ("'That's a sin.' 'Not when it's a war,' says my sister.") While their story is one of near misses, they never really stand a chance.

Shea exquisitely captures the straightforward voice of this young girl; Hula draws its power from this nonjudgmental immediacy. No narrator translates from the relative safety of middle age. No one gives distance. There is only the voice of one 10-year-old in the backyard, her playground and battlefield.