Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Ursula, Under

Ursula, Under

Hill, Ingrid

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 0143035452
ISBN13: 9780143035459
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: Jun 28 2005
Pages: 512
Weight: 0.94
Height: 1.12 Width: 5.30 Depth: 8.02
Language: English
A daring novel of culture, history, and heredity, hailed as extravagant and absorbing (Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife)

A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the attention of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft. 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.

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.

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