Ursula, Under

by Ingrid Hill

The author gives away her story's artistic raison d'etre in the first 13 pages. Ursula is the much-loved, over-protected daughter of a multiracial couple trying to offer her the solid home they were denied as children. The three of them live in a trailer in Michigan's rural upper peninsula.

Her father, Justin Wong, a half-Chinese/half-Polish gutter cleaner and musician, carries the sting of his itinerant, harmonica-playing father's abandonment. Annie Maki, Ursula's librarian mom, escaped from an alcoholic father not long after her loving mother died. Annie, forced to use a walker because of a bike accident when she was 10, is searching deeper for her family's American roots. She scopes out former mining towns in the peninsula to get a firsthand look at where her great-grandfather, a Finnish émigré, died in a cave-in long ago.