I was judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’d been doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got me to read on even though it was among 296 other books I’m charged to read.

Zorrie had came to harbor what proved a lifelong distrust of the deep hours, as her aunt referred to them, when the mind played tricks on itself.

What an incredible story that tells the scope of a woman's life and her ability to fight her way into the life that she wants and needs. It is a very moving story, excellent work.

Laird Hunt's Zorrie is one of those books I'll be purchasing multiple copies of to give as gifts. It's an everyone-should-read-this title. On the surface, Zorrie is a brief, even simple, novel. We meet Zorrie when she's young, but the book focuses on her adult life, spent almost exclusively in small towns in Indiana. There's no huge crisis in this novel: it just recounts the story of Zorrie's life, her different jobs, her friendships. And that life—no more eventful than most—is utterly beautiful and hope-bestowing without being at all treacly. Every moment of reading it, even the more difficult moments, is a kind of gentle benediction, reminding us of the immense value of individual lives.
Seriously, no matter what kind of fiction you gravitate toward (I usually read dark literary fiction or historical mysteries) Zorrie will leave you feeling restored and hopeful. Don't miss that opportunity.

I received a free electronic review copy from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

Zorrie is a small book that I found to be big in emotion and content. Zorrie Underwood is a delightful woman who had a sad and lonely childhood. She was orphaned at an early age and raised by a cruel and unfeeling aunt. As a young adult she found herself homeless but determined to make her own way. Her hard work, kind heart and general goodness eventually brought her good friends, a kind husband and a community that valued her. It seemed Zorrie had finally found contentment and happiness but her life continued to be a challenge.

I was totally engrossed in the story of Zorrie’s life. The writing in this book is simple but very moving. Zorrie’s life left me feeling nostalgic and reflective of my own life. I definitely enjoyed this book and I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good story

Reading someones life story in less that 200 pages is a feat in and of itself, but to have the characters so well developed, and the reader completely immersed is just incredible. Perfect in its simplicity, the flow almost poetic, nothing inherently special about the story itself, yet you feel privileged that you get to witness the life of Zorrie Underwood from such an intimate vantage point. There is something uncommonly refreshing about this novel, and is an enigma to me as to why.

Could it be my obsession with the radium girls? I have read quite a bit about the radium rage, and fallout, quite a bit, the stories of the girls still haunting my mind to this day, but I haven't read much about the women that continued to live a seemingly normal life after working as dial painters. In Zorrie, we get to witness one woman's sad and simple journey, spending her life isolated, yet not alone, a life most likely reflecting the life of many women that grew up in that era, especially if they came from, or lived in, a farming community.

There isn't any extraordinary or even special about Zorrie. It is ingeniously the journey of a woman who simply lived, worked hard, loved, and yet at the same time lived a pretty desolate life, reminiscent in her thoughts, and overwhelmed by her memories and the path she had taken in her lifetime. It is a fable we can all relate to the older we get and leaves enough curiosity about where Zorrie will end up to keep the reader engaged until the end.

The writing itself is sublime and is the perfect length, in my opinion, and incredibly easy to get lost in. A must read that will lead you through the life of a remarkably unremarkable woman.

4.5! I really enjoyed this quiet and slow story of Zorrie Underwood and her simple midwestern life. I loved seeing her older years unfold - I think I would have loved her as a person. Great novel for every reader that likes gentle stories!

Special thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury publishing for the ARC of this book.

Zorrie tells the story of a woman , spanning a lifeime, trying to find herself. What family she had, all pretty much have died off. She finds herself sleeping in barns, getting nourishment where she can , and landing a job in a radium plant, which we all know, is not safe. But it's a job, and as she acquires things, she stars to build a life.

A story not for everyone, but I was in between books, and gave it a try, and I liked it. There is no big twist, it's just a good book with a lot of descriptive surroundings and her trials and tribulations. Very different from the books I've been reading, but that's not a bad thing sometimes. The story revolves around Zorrie, I could relate with the hard times but it was not my favorite book of the year, not even close. I felt myself rushing through it to get to another. Is that bad? No. I just had 3 books on my TBR list that came in so a better review of this book will follow. Sorry, I don't like to skim, so I probably didn't give it the time I should've.

3 stars!

Laird Hunt's eighth novel, ZORRIE, is a slight but poignant chronicle of a woman alone --- and the grief, historic events and transformations that make her whole.

Hunt’s titular character was orphaned at a young age and left to live with her reclusive aunt, a woman who has “drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness.” Her aunt values only good, hard work --- and luckily for Zorrie, this is something that comes easily to her. Though she is not afraid to use a little elbow grease and excels and inspires in the classroom, her ambition is no match for hardscrabble Indiana life. Upon the unceremonious death of her aunt, she becomes homeless.

After a few stops and starts, Zorrie finds herself employed by Radium Dial Company in Illinois, where she paints glow-in-the-dark numbers on clock faces using the miraculous --- and incredibly dangerous --- element radium. Working in an airy and high-ceilinged school, Zorrie and her coworkers lick radium-tipped brushes and secretly hide reserves of the glowing powder that is said to have near-magical properties. Finding herself full of hope for nearly the first time in her life, Zorrie easily makes friends and delights in the girls’ outings as they sprinkle radium powder on their dresses and paint radium hearts on their faces. Nicknamed the “Ghost Girls,” they flit around town like dazzling lightning bugs, and though Zorrie enjoys the camaraderie, she knows she must return to the soil of Indiana.

Once again homeless and unemployed, Zorrie makes use of her adaptability and ability to work hard and finds both employment and a bed on the farm of Gus and Bessie Underwood. When Harold, their handsome son, comes calling, Zorrie finds herself a husband, too. For years the two work side by side on their farm, taking advantage of their close-knit community where everyone helps everyone out, and wives bring lunches and baked goods to husbands tilling the fields. Feeling once again that dangerous niggling of hope, Zorrie is delighted when she learns she is pregnant and soon begins taking radium supplements to help her baby grow. But the radioactive element wreaks havoc on her body, taking her baby’s life and adding a whole new layer of longing to her already painfully full life. When World War II calls, her husband answers, leaving her to tend to their farm --- and her grief --- alone.

In the months that follow, Zorrie dedicates herself once again to her work, even more so when she receives word that Harold has died. With nothing but her loneliness to fill her time, she becomes nearly obsessive in her drive, even as her heart starts to pull her toward another man, Noah, with an equally tragic past. The ebbs and flows of her relationship with him --- and with the memories of her husband, the other Ghost Girls and her beloved home state --- take center stage, with Hunt drawing a portrait not only of Zorrie, but of America itself.

In six breathtaking chapters, Hunt chronicles the moments both life-changing and mundane that make up Zorrie’s life. Writing in lyrical but economic prose, he masterfully paints a detailed portrait of a remarkable woman with the finest details while still managing to weave in sweeping historical events without ever distracting from his main character. He tackles huge, universal questions --- “if truth was hard and impervious or soft and easily bruised” --- right alongside plainly spoken observations of the pastoral. Farm life, Depression-era America and the beauty of the natural world are all monitored and broken down by our keen-eyed author.

Described through Zorrie’s melancholic voice, there is no element that does not take on a power even greater than the sum of its parts. A hidden smile is “a gleam, a little bit of breath on a little bit of near-burned-out coal,” a painful truth is “shipwrecked on the shores of...old family complaints.” Hunt is ambitious in his scope, but no one is more impressive or memorable than Zorrie herself: “Small but sure of purpose within the great mechanism of the seasons, she became a pin on a barrel of wind, a screw in a dial of sunlight, a tooth on an escape wheel of rain.” Reading the book is exactly like this: full of life and as inevitable as the seasons, but also full of fragile and delicate truths.

ZORRIE is a novel that feels like it lives and breathes, and Hunt’s ability to interweave unimaginable beauty with poignant, deep longing makes it an instant American classic.

My thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
I enjoyed the author's "panoramic" writing, lyrical style. Entire days and weeks are often rolled into a sentence - years, into a few paragraphs.

Zorrie's life was never easy. She was very young when her parents died. She was then sent to live with her bitter aunt, who died when Zorrie was twenty-one. Penniless, Zorrie roamed the countryside for work, refusing to take charity. On her quest for work, Zorrie meets wild Janie and works alongside her for a while, but then eventually gets homesick and returns to Indiana. Back home, she finds work, settles into life and meets Harold Underwood, and they marry. They are happy together on his small farm, but life is not without its trials: she miscarries their first child and is unable to bear other children. When her beloved husband, Harold, is killed during the second world war, Zorrie continues to work their farm and live out her days, until she begins to tire easily and senses that her own end is near. Zorrie seemed to be so accepting and fatalistic about life and its many disappointments and hardships.

This was a very well written "slice of life" novel, but I felt distanced from these characters, as if they were the ghosts that Janie kept referring to. Zorrie and the rest of the characters seemed to be flashing before my eyes as if they were on a movie screen. I couldn't really sense them as real-life people: they were shadow figures. They felt like the figment of someone's hazy memory, conjured while they were reading a deceased relative's journal, a journal that recounted the life of a dear, departed friend. This book "mellowed me out" as I like to say. The quiet writing style reminded me a bit of Kent Haruf: life's many melodramas told in a stoic monotone. I rate this a 3.7 out of 5.

Zorrie is beautiful and melancholy in equal measure, a haunting and resonant sepia toned jewel of a tale. Laird Hunt's imaginative style is still very much on display in this book, but in a much more restrained and understated way than ...In the Dark of the Woods. Some things haven't changed, however; he still has an uncanny way of writing complete women, souls and all. I really enjoyed the quiet magnificence of this book, similar to the sunsets that accompany so much of Zorrie's midwestern life.

This quiet novel reminded me so much of my grandparents’ farm in Nebraska. Nothing earthshaking takes place, life moves on from day to day, filled with joy, friendship, sadness and hard work. By placing an independent female as the protagonist Zorrie takes a different approach. Zorrie grew up with an aunt until the aunt’s death, and then Zorrie became one of the many people moving from place to place in the depression looking for work. An opportunity to live with an elderly couple and care for them led to her marriage to their son. Harold and Zorrie ran the family farm. Harold went off to fight in WWII and never returned. Zorrie remained farming alone with the help of hired hands. Zorrie became a memorial character and probably reflects the life of many women during the depression and many of them probably echo her loneliness with the death of a spouse during the war. The book is less than 200 pages and yet by the end, the reader is fully engaged in Zorrie’s mundane life.

There is a simple heart with the main character Zorrie Underwood.
She is one you would love to be her neighbor, right now in the farm, in the fields and gaze at the beauty surrounding, to grasp it and say yes we doing what we can, using our sweat, labor and good heartedness, a minimalistic life.
Simplistic lives and hearts maybe almost like the title A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert, of which the author mentioned in acknowledgments section, that he held close.
Feelings of nostalgia stirred in the reader.
A memorable character Zorrie starring in a pleasant heart warming tale immersing you with lucid and lush prose along with hearts at battle with love, loss and grief, life’s transient and weighty matters. Laird Hunt a very capable conductor of realism as well as surrealism.
If In the House in the Dark of the Woods being his surreal creation with horror then this being his wonderful realism creation with Zorrie.

Hunt has written a lovely, if painful, slim novel about the sort of woman we don't often read about. Zorrie, orphaned young, lives with her abusive aunt on a farm until her aunt dies, when she moves, several times, until she returns to Indiana. She works for a period as a radium girl, finding friendship with the other women. She marries Harold, has several miscarriages, and then loses him when he is killed in WWII. Now, at the end of her life, she contemplates it all. This captures, in taut language, life during the Depression and WWII, as well as in its aftermath. It might seem that she's repeatedly knocked down and while that's true, it's also true that she keeps going on. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

Zorrie Underwood is orphaned as a child and goes to live when her aunt until she is 21 and her dies and leaves her with nothing.
She wants: a good job, family, friends and most of all wants to be loved.
She has a hard life and works hard in Indiana and parts of Illinois. She does get a job with radium, painting the dials on watch faces. She doesn’t stay in the job long but it does have effects on her. She loves working the land. She doesn’t understand why folks her age want to just watch TV or crossword puzzles.

Zorrie is looking for a simple life. We follow her and we truly care for her. Story is character based and Zorrie is a simple/ordinary but in an extraordinary way.
I was fearful this was going to be a sad story but it is a “Feel good” story. ⭐⭐⭐ + (not 4 Stars for me but I did enjoy it!)
I couldn’t believe I was finished ~ I wanted more!
Note: One of the negatives about an eBook via a hardback. Hardback you KNOW your progress and can see how many pages left but many times with an eBook I am surprised when I am almost finished!
Yep! I found I was finished as the “Acknowledgements” were in front me.
BTW I always love reading the ‘Author’s Note’ and the ‘Acknowledgments’!

Want to thank NetGalley and Bloomsburg USA, Bloomsburg Publishing for this uncorrected Digital Galley granted to me early for an honest professional review.
Publishing Release Date scheduled for February 9, 2021

The story of a life, a time, a place, a woman. Dreams imagined, dreams left behind. A woman who for a brief moment in time dreamed of more.

Zorrie Underwood was born in the early years of the 20th century, her first taste of loss came when she was still a child and first her mother, and then her father lost their lives to diptheria. She was left in the care of an aunt, despite her father’s reluctance to do so for she had drunk too deeply from the cup of bitterness and responded to Zorrie’s visible signs of grief with physical punishment.

There are moments in her early adult years of brief, if somewhat fleeting almost-happiness when she is on her own, after her aunt dies and she is working as one of the girls painting radium on clocks. She still seems somewhat reserved, and set apart from their tendency to frivolity, remaining a bit on the periphery of their lightheartedness. She meets a man, Harold, and they eventually marry, after a time she suffers a miscarriage which is followed by another loss that follows when Harold goes off to war. With Harold gone, she works their farm, alternating her thoughts of her loss with thoughts of another man.

In 176 pages, it offers us a glimpse at a life of a woman, as well as a time and place which on the surface bears so little resemblance to our time in some ways, yet the feeling of isolation is at times palpable, which most can relate to these days. Like us, Zorrie reflects on the past, the good days along with questioning choices made, the wishes and desires for when things return to a life perceived as normal, a hope for happier times, and drawing comfort from happier moments remembered.

This is a lovely, quiet story that shares Zorrie’s thoughts and dreams, her reflections on losses and a peaceful sense of joy and appreciation for her quietly lived life.


Pub Date: 09 Feb 2021

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Bloomsbury USA / Bloomsbury Publishing

#Zorrie #NetGalley

Synopsis: Zorrie was born in Indiana but when her parents die, it falls to her only living relative, an aunt to finish raising her and when the aunt passes, Zorrie is once again orphaned and must look for work. It is the time of the Depression and work is hard to find. She drifts west to Illinois and ends up getting a job painting clock faces. What Zorrie and the other women at the factory don’t know is that the radium-filled paint will decades later leave many of them sick or dead from cancer. Fortunately, Zorrie does not stay in that job long as she becomes homesick and moves back to Indiana settling in a small town in the same county she was born. There she finds a community that respects and supports her and eventually she marries a farmer, Harold. Set against the backdrop of 20th century Indiana, we follow the highs and lows of Zorrie’s life.

My thoughts: Zorrie was a likeable character and while her life wasn’t horrible, it wasn’t the easiest or happiest either and I found her to be a lonely person at times. This is not a long novel (under 200 pages) but the author managed to packed a lot into it. I definitely got Kent Haruf vibes from his novel “Our Souls at Night” when I read the last quarter of this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for providing a free copy of this book to me in exchange for an honest review. I will be posting this on social media, bookstore websites and my blog upon publication date and will add my links at that time.

3/5 stars Goodreads

Wow! I so enjoyed Zorrie. And it's hard to describe why because there's not much to the plot and the writing and pacing are so understated. This short novel focuses on Zorrie's life, from beginning to end. It starts just after the depression in Indiana, where Zorrie has lived with a harsh aunt and must quickly figure out how to make her own way in the world. She works briefly in a factory in Illinois, where they use radium to paint clock faces. She then moves back to a farming community in Indiana where she spends the rest of her life living and working on a farm. She has her share of hardship and heartbreak, but also some relationships and the satisfaction of working hard and making order in her life. There really isn't much to say about the story. Zorrie's strength is the writing. Hunt conveys Zorrie's emotions perfectly with deceptively simple language and without melodrama. By the end, Zorrie felt like a real person -- a distant relative who lived a good but melancholy life. It was hard not to mourn the end of her life as I finished the novel. This was a buddy read with Diane and Angela and we all loved it. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a chance to read an advance copy.

The unsung lives of ordinary people sometimes make for extraordinary stories. This novel is one of them. It’s a quiet story, my favorite kind. I found here the impeccable, beautiful writing that I found in the first book I read by Laird Hunt, [book:Neverhome|33977608]. In less than 200 pages, Hunt not just beautifully but skillfully tells of Zorrie’s whole life, one filled with the sadness of loss and the grief that comes with it, the uncertainty of where she wanted to be , who she was, and the joy and comfort when she finds it, the peace of acceptance. Zorrie Underwood reminded me of a quieter version of the inimitable Ivy Rowe in [book:Fair and Tender Ladies|199635] She’s not as outspoken as Ivy, but equally fierce in her determination and steadfastness, equally brave. Farming life in the Midwest, the Great Depression, the radium girls, the war are all reflected in Zorrie’s life story. I’m not going to touch on the plot aspects of these because sometimes it’s enough to just say - this is a beautifully written story. I recommend you read it and let the book speak for itself.

I read this with Diane and Esil. It’s always a great experience to share our thoughts.

I received a copy of this book from Bloomsbury Publishing through Edelweiss and NetGalley.

A moving and beautifully written story of a life.
Zorrie had an ordinary life, this follows her from childhood in the Depression era, in Indiana, where she was orphaned at a young age..to her last day, all in less then 200 pages.
Very good!

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury USA for the ARC!

A beautiful story with interesting characters that are well written and fully fleshed out. Would love to learn more about the “ghost girls”!

However, the beginning felt drawn out and the ending felt abrupt to me, and I didn’t like how passive it all was. This is not my typical read so this might just not be the best genre for me!