Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill

Rating: 5.0

What it's about:
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. -taken from Barnes&Noble.com

My thoughts:
Ursula, Under is a beautiful story of a little girl and all the people throughout the centuries that went in to creating this little girl. The main story is set around 2 year old Ursula who has fallen down a mine shaft. The book though, is actually many short stories about Ursula's ancestors starting in the third century B.C. and working it's way up through Ursula's parents. Sprinkled between these shorter stories is the story of Ursula and the rescue efforts going on in Michigan's Upper Penninsula. The characters in Ursula, Under are many and varied. The environment, whether it be Michigan, Finland or China, is lush and beautiful. After I turned the last page I wanted to flip back to the beginning and start again immediatley. Ingrid Hill is very knowlegeable about history and culture and I can tell a lot of research went into creating this novel. The end result is an impressive debut novel.