Ursula Under

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. <p>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.</p><p>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 <b>Ursula Under</b> is most of all wonderfully entertaining--a daring saga of culture history and heredity.</p>