{"product_id":"9780143035459","title":"Ursula, Under","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUrsula'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, \u003cb\u003eUrsula, Under\u003c\/b\u003e is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining—a daring saga of culture, history, and heredity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47022167195888,"sku":"9780143035459","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780143035459_p0.jpg?v=1769909614","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780143035459","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}