Hula

In her remarkable first novel, Shea hauntingly evokes the spirits and sensations of childhood. The lives of two sisters at the crossroads between childhood and adolescence are described in lyrical, hypnotic prose. Set in the early 1960s, nearly all the action takes place in the backyard of the girls' suburban Virginia home, to them a surreal, adventurous place in which they act out their wishes, hopes and dreams, and try to cope--often ritualistically--with family dysfunction. Their father, whose mind has been ravaged by war, is given to drunken gunplay and sudden explosions of rage. Their mother is whimsical and distant; the marriage is disintegrating. The girls are forced back upon their inner resources and each other for a sense of security. Convincingly portraying the budding sexuality of early adolescence in sometimes shocking situations, Shea re-creates the numinous landscape of childhood in which animals and vegetation possess immanent intelligence and personality. The nameless terrors in their home life counterpoints the irrepressible optimism that is native to childhood and that, Shea implies, can see children safely through the grimmest of circumstances, such as the searing climax of this quiet, expertly told novel. (Jan.)