Ursula Under (Paperback)

Annie and Justin Wong are on a rare outing with their daughter in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Annie, a librarian, has developed an interest in her ancestors and they are exploring the area where her Finnish great-grandfather lived before his death in a 1926 mine explosion. They stop for a picnic and spot a deer in the trees. Ursula goes after it. It's a charmed moment: a lovely June day, a delighted child, happy, relaxed parents.

"She gives them a sign in mime: Watch me. Ursula's every gesture seems meant for the comedic stage. She is a natural. She tiptoes toward the treeline. The deer disappears deeper into the forest, as silent as breath. Ursula puts on a burst of speed, silent herself, looking back at Justin and Annie, steps into the trees, and disappears from sight. 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."

As Justin races off to find help and Annie cannot yet take in what we already know - that Ursula has fallen down an unmapped ventilation shaft - the narrative veers, following Annie's anguished thought: "So many generations, back into history and then prehistory, all concentrated into this one little girl."

At first Hill drops back only a generation. We meet Justin's warm-hearted mother, Mindy Ji, who never stopped loving Joe Cimmer, the musician who left them both when Justin was little older than Ursula. We glimpse Annie's father, an abusive drunk who probably killed her mother while Annie was in the hospital after a hit and run accident that left her legs permanently damaged. We've already met the drunk who hit Annie, though we don't know that yet - Hill, the omnipresent, omniscient authorial voice, parcels out her knowledge, creating a pattern of pieces that merge into a seamless whole at the end.

Hill drops back further to visit key ancestors Justin and Annie will never be (consciously) aware of, in a series of precisely named chapters that alternate with the ongoing scene around the mineshaft.

"The Alchemist's Last Concubine," introduces Qin Lao, a third-century BC alchemist who, in a happy accident of fate and generosity, has his first and only child in his 79th year. A few centuries later "The Caravan-Master's Lieutenant," a deaf man with a captivating gift for storytelling, is smitten by a deaf Finnish girl, who has thus far been indulged by a doting father in her desire not to marry.

"A Wastrel Killed by a Snail," Chen Bing, fathers a daughter in the California gold fields iin 1851 before he meets his freakish - and timely end. For, had he lived, he would have sexually abused his daughter, causing her eventually to run from him into the path of a runaway horse and be killed at the age of ten, "stopping the lineage of Ursula Wong - who would of course never have come to be - then and there."

Hill's authorial voice often interrupts these brief, but fully realized life histories to make connections across the centuries, or share information unknowable to the character concerned. This authorial omniscience reveals the patterns visible only at a distance and emphasizes the essential role of each haphazard, accidental life in the intricate and exacting fabric of history.

Hill's language is rich, whimsical and visual. Her voice combines a playful, comic sense of omniscience with the intimate joys and tragedies of individual lives. An ambitious, successful debut which leaves the reader with a sense of satisfied wonder.