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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2004, 476 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2005, 512 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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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.
1
Ursula
On a crystalline,
perfectly blue morning in June, after a day of angry pewter skies and of
sheeting, driving rain, we enter our story. Clouds pile themselves
picturesquely, theatrically, like plump odalisques, against the blue,
clear-edged and astonishing. The forest all around is a palette of greens. Wild
chokecherry trees are in raucous bloom. It is as if this were the first morning
of the world, perfect. Even the garter snakes slithering under roots, over
rocks, over roots, through the grass seem a part of the day's jubilance. Dew on
fat ferns catches the sunlight in bursts and disperses it, starlike.
We are just miles inland from the tip of the Keweenaw
Peninsula of Michigan, which juts out into Lake Superior, the arrival point for
the earliest hardy wide-eyed settlers arriving from the East on lake packet
boats to stake claims and seek copper, well before the Civil War. Lifting off
from a branch overhead, a red-winged blackbird calls out ...
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
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife
Extravagant and absorbing ... I didn't want it to end.
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