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Ursula, Under
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Ursula, Under Paperback - 2005

by Hill, Ingrid

  • Used

This remarkable debut novel opens with a two-year-old girl trapped in an abandoned mine shaft, then travels back through history to trace the extraordinary lives of her most unusual and surprising ancestors.

Description

Penguin Publishing Group. Used - Good. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.
Used - Good
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Details

  • Title Ursula, Under
  • Author Hill, Ingrid
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition 1st Printing
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 512
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Penguin Publishing Group, E Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.A.
  • Date June 28, 2005
  • Features Table of Contents
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 3129332-75
  • ISBN 9780143035459 / 0143035452
  • Weight 0.94 lbs (0.43 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.02 x 5.3 x 1.12 in (20.37 x 13.46 x 2.84 cm)
  • Ages 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Library of Congress subjects Domestic fiction, Suspense fiction
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

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Summary

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.

From the publisher

Ingrid Hill is the author of the short story collection 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 twelve children, including two sets of twins.  She lives in Iowa City.

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Media reviews

"[Hill] astounds with her ability to meld simply and beautifully told stories, stories with an air of fable about them." —The Washington Post Book World

"It’s a divine view of a family tree... Ride along to the end of this merry, generous book." —Time Out New York

"Hill’s stories lure-the characters are vital, clever, detailed, appealing; I wolfed the book down like a bowl of cookie dough." —The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Ursula, Under never ceases to surprise and compel. What a grand and daring book." —Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Citations

  • Ingram Advance, 06/01/2005, Page 79

About the author

Ingrid Hill is the author of the short story collection 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 twelve children, including two sets of twins. She lives in Iowa City.

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