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Ursula, Under Book

Once in a while, a first-time novelist dares to write bravely and big. Ingrid Hill has done just that with her breathtaking first novel.In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. When a two-year-old girl falls down a mine shaft it is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in her rescue. Little Ursula Wong is the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. The Wongs live in a decrepit mobile home and their child is designated by one onlooker as "half-breed trailer trash," not worth all the attention and expense. Oh yeah? responds the story's narrative voice. Let's just see. And here the novel explodes into a grand saga of culture, history, and heredity. By its end, we've met, among others of Ursula Wong's ancestors, a 2nd-century B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned consort to a 16th-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer on exotic Chinese topics traveling the Midwest at the end of the 19th century; and Ursula's great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, a mine worker who died in a cave-in at age twenty-nine.Ursula's ultimate fate echoes that of her ancestors, so many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that any given individual's life comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining.Read More

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  • Product Description

    One of the most widely praised and rapturously entertaining first novels in recent years begins with a little girl falling down an abandoned mineshaft in Michigan?s Upper Peninsula. Her name is Ursula Wong, she?s part Chinese, part Finnish, only two years old, and soon the dangerous effort to rescue her has an entire country glued to the TV. As it follows that effort, Ursula, Under re-creates the chain of ancestors, across two thousand years, whose lives culminate in the fragile miracle of a little girl underground: a Chinese alchemist in the third century bc, the orphaned playmate to a seventeenth- century Swedish queen, Ursula's great-great-grandfather who was the casualty of a mining accident that eerily foreshadows Ursula?s dilemma, and many more. A work of symphonic richness and profound empathy, Ursula, Under dramatically demonstrates that no one is truly alone.

  • 0143035452
  • 9780143035459
  • Ingrid Hill
  • 28 June 2005
  • Penguin Books
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 476
  • Reprint
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