5/15/2023 0 Comments Hula by Lisa Shea![]() ![]() I didn’t read Hula until shortly after it came out in 1994, when I was nearly thirty, but it articulated so much of what I had felt, but not known how to say, about the pitfalls and possibilities of childhood. It’s the kind of book that reminds us-in a stunningly economical 155 pages-of the unknown’s emotional possibilities for children even as it depicts its often terrible consequences. Most of the novel takes place in the family’s backyard, where the boundaries between the civilized and the wild, the desired and the feared, the real and the imagined are never clear. The younger one describes the summers of 1964 and ’65 with her older sister, her largely absent mother, her tormented father. “Nothing will catch you”: Is that comfort or torment? “Nothing will let you go”: Is that to be celebrated or lamented? A source of solace or fear? Hula concerns itself with two sisters in Virginia. ![]() It’s the perfect introduction to the slim volume that follows. The epigraph of Lisa Shea’s celebrated, but now neglected, first and only novel is from a Jorie Graham poem: “Nothing will catch you. ![]()
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