Summary and Reviews of Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill

Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill

Ursula, Under

by Ingrid Hill
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  • Critics' Consensus (6):
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  • First Published:
  • May 1, 2004, 476 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jun 2005, 512 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

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.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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Ursula, Under published in hardcover to generally very positive reviews last year. A few felt it to be a little uneven/unwieldy, for example, Kirkus Review summed up describing it as, 'wildly uneven, awesomely ambitious: a mess, in fact, but you can't help but be impressed by the author's commitment and boldness'. Recently released in paperback it is picking up enthusiastic readers by word of mouth, and would make an interesting book club choice.

This is Ingrid Hill's first novel, follow a collection of short stories, Dixie Church Interstate Blues (1989). From her interview it becomes clear that it's not only in her writing that she likes to take on challenging tasks! She says, 'when I was left a single mom with eleven children (she now has twelve), I had to get a career to support them, so I went back to graduate school to be able to teach literature and writing at the college level. I needed two foreign languages as part of this program, and I was feeling a bit heady with both the impossibility and the necessity of this, so I asked for Swedish first. My father was Swedish-American, a sea captain, and I'd always wanted to study Swedish but never had a chance. As part of my program, I got to study in Sweden, and the Swedish history and culture classes really intrigued me, especially the era of Gustavus Adolphus.'..continued

Full Review (232 words)

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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

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