Ursula, Under [B1255]

2005 PB in nice clean condition. 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 unduplicable 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 mixed Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Blown away by this one! Incredibly complex, deep, emotional, & written in such a lyrical way, I loved the way it flowed through history & time, from past to present. It's an incredible story, of family & ancestry & how our pasts shape our futures. The plot is like one I've never read & I was fascinated by the different cultures & how everything tied together. It weaves history with the present so smoothly, it feels like you are reading a dream. I highly recommend this to anyone who loves family stories/ancestry/history, this is a heavy read, but worth it! A true masterpiece you won't soon forget."; "I enjoyed this book but it's very complicated and you have to really pay attention while you're reading to keep track of all the storylines. I kept wanting to put it aside but the story is intriguing so I kept going back to it."; ; "Why hasn't this book been made into a film? It is so needed in these times. Or maybe people are not ready to admit that we are all connected? Someone may seem very different to us, but we don't have to go back too far to find the connections. We fiercely guard the idea of 'tribes'. But tell the true history and that fantasy falls apart. There truly is only one race, the Human Race, it's not a cliché."