Ursula, Under

ISBN: 1565123883

Title: Ursula, Under

Author: Ingrid Hill

KDL Description:

Ursula Wong, a racially mixed child, falls down a mine shaft and rescue efforts go on against a background of stories about her remarkable ancestors.

Amazon 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 shaft — “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.” 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 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 — a daring saga of culture, history, and heredity.