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.

About the Author

Ingrid (Hokanson) Hill was born in New York City, and because her father was a Swedish-American captain, she spent much of her childhood in New Orleans. Although she spent three years in Washington State, she has spent half of her adult life in the university communities of Ann Arbor, Michigan, receiving a BA in 1972 and Iowa City, Iowa, where she earned her doctorate.Hill, who has twelve children, including two sets of twins, began her writing career as a short story writer. Her first published book is a collection of these stories titled Dixie Church Interstate Blues. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa and has twice received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been married twice, marrying James Hill, of Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, in 1989. She lives in Iowa City as of 2020.Her honors and awards include: Two grants from National Endowment for the Arts; Great Lakes Book Award, and Best Novel designation, Washington Post Books World, both 2004, and Michigan Notable Book designation, 2005, all for Ursula, Under.