SOURCE: "Full Disclosure," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXIX, No. 11, March 15, 1994, p. 57.

[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...