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: #1290475 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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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.

Customer Reviews

Cinema. Chapters will dance in your head.
"Tapestry" is not the right word. "Symphony?" Not quite. "Cinematic," seems closest. Reading this astonishing novel is like riding a canoe on subsurface white water, surfing streams in the sea of time and culture, from ancient China, to Finland to Upper Michigan. Each chapter is like a cinematic a short story, and it's somehow both a page-turner and a book that gives you patience, because you know you'll be returning to read it again, to visit the wonderful characters that will be like old friends, or stories passed down through your own family. Eight pages in, you'll be hooked; rather, you'll fall into it and lose yourself...

Breathtaking debut in scope, style and story
Hill's debut novel is at once sprawling and tightly plotted, broad in scope and narrow in focus. It takes place over the course of one endless, terrifying day in the life of 2-year-old Ursula Wong's parents, and encompasses some of the thousands of years and generations that went into the making of that child.

Annie and Justin Wong are on a rare outing with their daughter in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Annie, a librarian, has developed an interest in her ancestors and they are exploring the area where her Finnish great-grandfather lived before his death in a 1926 mine explosion. They stop for a picnic and spot a deer in the trees. Ursula goes after it. It's a charmed moment: a lovely June day, a delighted child, happy, relaxed parents.

"She gives them a sign in mime: Watch me. Ursula's every gesture seems meant for the comedic stage. She is a natural. She tiptoes toward the treeline. The deer disappears deeper into the forest, as silent as breath. Ursula puts on a burst of speed, silent herself, looking back at Justin and Annie, steps into the trees, and disappears from sight. The 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."

As Justin races off to find help and Annie cannot yet take in what we already know - that Ursula has fallen down an unmapped ventilation shaft - the narrative veers, following Annie's anguished thought: "So many generations, back into history and then prehistory, all concentrated into this one little girl."

At first Hill drops back only a generation. We meet Justin's warm-hearted mother, Mindy Ji, who never stopped loving Joe Cimmer, the musician who left them both when Justin was little older than Ursula. We glimpse Annie's father, an abusive drunk who probably killed her mother while Annie was in the hospital after a hit and run accident that left her legs permanently damaged. We've already met the drunk who hit Annie, though we don't know that yet - Hill, the omnipresent, omniscient authorial voice, parcels out her knowledge, creating a pattern of pieces that merge into a seamless whole at the end.

Hill drops back further to visit key ancestors Justin and Annie will never be (consciously) aware of, in a series of precisely named chapters that alternate with the ongoing scene around the mineshaft.

"The Alchemist's Last Concubine," introduces Qin Lao, a third-century BC alchemist who, in a happy accident of fate and generosity, has his first and only child in his 79th year. A few centuries later "The Caravan-Master's Lieutenant," a deaf man with a captivating gift for storytelling, is smitten by a deaf Finnish girl, who has thus far been indulged by a doting father in her desire not to marry.

"A Wastrel Killed by a Snail," Chen Bing, fathers a daughter in the California gold fields iin 1851 before he meets his freakish - and timely end. For, had he lived, he would have sexually abused his daughter, causing her eventually to run from him into the path of a runaway horse and be killed at the age of ten, "stopping the lineage of Ursula Wong - who would of course never have come to be - then and there."

Hill's authorial voice often interrupts these brief, but fully realized life histories to make connections across the centuries, or share information unknowable to the character concerned. This authorial omniscience reveals the patterns visible only at a distance and emphasizes the essential role of each haphazard, accidental life in the intricate and exacting fabric of history.

Hill's language is rich, whimsical and visual. Her voice combines a playful, comic sense of omniscience with the intimate joys and tragedies of individual lives. An ambitious, successful debut which leaves the reader with a sense of satisfied wonder.