Ursula, Under -- Ingrid Hill, Paperback
A daring novel of culture, history, and heredity, hailed as "extravagant and absorbing" (Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife) A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the attention of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft. 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. 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 person--little Ursula Wong. Ursula's story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existence--like ours--comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining.
Author: Ingrid Hill
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 6/28/2005
Pages: 512
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.94 lbs
Size: 8.02" H x 5.3" L x 1.12" W
ISBN: 9780143035459
