Hula by Lisa Shea
My rating: 4/5 cats
i am choosing to picture the sisters in this book as looking like sally mann’s photographs. those eyes… these kids have seen some shit. and it manifests itself in a thousand ways in the details of this book – the foundations are disturbed.
this is a family story, focused upon the dangerous and subtle undertow of the first awareness of sex and death and their commingling in preadolescent girls.
this book resides in the porous space between short stories and novel. there is no individual arc to each story, but neither does it create, at the end of the day, a cohesive novel. this book is a collection of things that happened to two sister characters during their formative years with a father suffering from PTSD, a war-memento metal plate in his head and a penchant for wearing a gorilla mask and hands, a dancer-mother who no longer dances, and is wilting under pressure, and a series of sexually curious and pre-predatory boys metaphorically peering over the fence.
i loved that all of the action took place during two subsequent summers – it is like coming across a jumble of someone else’s photographs in a box and there are so many questions about what happened in between the time when the pictures were taken. it’s a really excellent way to tell a story in moments.
the only thing preventing this book from a five-star cat rating was the ending. i liked how shadowy the tone of the rest of the book was – it felt dangerous and subterranean and the end felt flashlit and exposed, if that makes any sense to anyone who hasn’t read it.
this isn’t the david lynch exploration of the horrors of suburbia – it is more subtle even than that. it takes place in the underpinnings – the secret dirty linens of family history and the mysteries of teen-girl psychology. it isn’t all sugar and spice, after all. a lot of it is violence and manipulation and confusion.
overall, a short little book that will stay with you for a while…
