Ursula, Under
By Ingrid Hill
(Penguin (Non-Classics), Paperback, 9780143035459, 512pp.)
Publication Date: June 2005
Categories: Literary
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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.
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.
[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) Extravagant and absorbing ... I didn't want it to end. (Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife)
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