Product Description

In Michigan's upper peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaftthe only sound is an astonished tiny intake of breath from Ursula as she goes down, like a penny into the slot of a bank, disappeared, gone. It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. One TV viewer following the action notes that the Wong family lives in a decrepit mobile home and wonders why all this time and money is being wasted on that half-breed trailer-trash kid. In response, the novel takes a breathtaking leap back in time to visit Ursula's most remarkable ancestors: a third-century-B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned playmate of a seventeenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer (on exotic Chinese topics) traveling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; her great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, who died at twenty-nine in a Michigan iron mine cave-in; and others whose richness and history are contained in the induplicable DNA of just one personlittle Ursula Wong. Ursula's story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existencelike ourscomes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaininga daring saga of culture, history, and heredity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1945273 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 476 pages

From Booklist
Hill's enchanting debut novel spans more than 2,000 years and is brimming with an engaging cast of characters. Annie and Justin Wong, who live in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, are on a day trip exploring the area where Annie's Finnish great-grandfather died in a mine collapse in 1926. Suddenly their only child, Ursula, disappears down an abandoned shaft, setting off a monumental rescue attempt and accompanying media frenzy. The author leaves that predictable plot behind, focusing instead on the young girl's many ancestors--those with the most interest in her safe return. A second-century B.C.E. Chinese alchemist, a deaf Finnish peasant living in 700 C.E., the child born to a crippled Chinese girl in the 1600s, and more--"a crowd of all the people whose blood and lives went into this little girl," brought vividly to life. In an elaborate "six degrees of separation" game, the author reveals centuries-old ties between relatives of both Annie and Justin, creating a magically entertaining, poetic, and heartfelt look at the often overlooked significance of extended family. Deborah Donovan
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Review
Ursula, Under is extravagant and absorbing. Each story opens into another story, and as each new chapter ended, I thought: I liked that one best. I didn't want it to end. Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife

About the Author
Ingrid Hill has published short stories in a range of magazines and is the author of one collection, Dixie Church Interstate Blues. She earned her Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Iowa and has twice received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The mother of twelve children, including two sets of twins, she and her family live in Iowa City.