HULA by Lisa Shea (Delta: $9.95;...

HULA by Lisa Shea (Delta: $9.95; 155 pp.). In this highly praised first novel, two sisters on the verge of adolescence watch as their father quietly goes mad over the course of two hot, sticky Virginia summers. As the tragedy unfolds, the narrator struggles to understand what is happening to her body and what the Vietnam War did to her father’s increasingly precarious mental state. Like a well-executed sketch, Shea’s prose captures the essential details of a scene, leaving the rest to the reader’s imagination.