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Zorrie :

Title :

Zorrie : a novel / Laird Hunt.

Title:

Zorrie :

Author:

Hunt, Laird

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

161 pages ; 22 cm

ISBN:

9781635575361

9781635578430

Production / Publication Information:

New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

Summary:

Cast adrift in the Depression-era West after the last of her relatives pass away, Zorrie survives by working at a radium processing plant before finding love, community and unexpected loss upon returning to her small Indiana hometown.

Language:

English

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Geographic Term:

United States -- History -- 20th century -- Fiction.

Subject Term:

Orphans -- Fiction.

Young women -- Indiana -- Fiction.

City and town life -- Indiana -- Fiction.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	FICTION HUNT	31330009000567	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	BOOK CLUB / HUNT	31330009337175	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Amesbury Public Library	FIC HUNT	32114002616051	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Boxford Town Library	FIC HUNT	32115002123402	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Burlington Public Library	F HUNT	32116003783871	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library	F HUNT	32117002052888	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Chelmsford Public Library	FIC/HUNT	31480011438675	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library	FIC/HUNT	31482002934597	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Dunstable Free Public Library	HUN	32118001038399	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library	FIC HUNT	32120001347879	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library	FIC HUNT	32121000895017	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library	FIC HUNT	30470001878445	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	FIC/HUNT L	31479007050114	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Ipswich Public Library	FIC HUNT, LAIRD	32122002826539	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	FIC HUN	31549004830690	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library	FIC HUNT	31481005509224	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library	FIC HUN	32124002049674	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library	PB/FIC	32124002044352	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Merrimac Public Library	F HUN	32125001367991	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library	F HUNT	32126001781512	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newbury Town Library	HUN	32127001269383	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	FIC HUNT L	32128003896017	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library	F HUNT	31478003783777	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library	FIC HUNT, L.	31550002411244	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Rockport Public Library	FIC HUNT	32129002431095	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Tewksbury Public Library	FICTION HUNT	32132003243063	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library	F HUNT	31990005104638	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award (Fiction)

From prize-winning, acclaimed author Laird Hunt, a poignant novel about a woman searching for her place in the world and finding it in the daily rhythms of life in rural Indiana.

"It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew."

As a girl, Zorrie Underwood's modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.

But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.

Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt's extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Hunt (In the House in the Dark of the Woods) documents an unremarkable life in this compassionate outing. Though the elderly farmer Zorrie Underwood is in failing health and near the end of her life, she continues working the fields as she has for 50-plus years. Perseverance and an industrious acceptance of her lot are the hallmarks of orphaned Zorrie's existence from birth, as shown by the time-jumping narrative. After the stern aunt who raised Zorrie dies in 1930, when Zorrie is 21, she takes whatever work she can find until she meets the loving elderly couple Gus and Bessie, for whom she splits and stacks wood. Her acquaintance with their upright son, Harold, who runs the family farm, evolves naturally into marriage. With Harold away during WWII, Zorrie bonds with their empathetic neighbor and farmhand, Noah, especially after Harold is killed in action, and it's Harold's memory that stays with her in the decades to follow. As the years progress, Gus and Bessie die, and Zorrie finds joy in a puppy, and forms a strong friendship with her neighbor Ruby. Hunt's storytelling flows smoothly, its rhythms unperturbed by preciousness or superfluous detail. Fans of Kent Haruf's Plainsong trilogy will love this subtle tale of rural life. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Feb.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated a plot point and referred to the character Ruby by the wrong name.

Kirkus Review

A woman's life in rural Indiana takes shape amid dreams, losses, and fulfillment in this quietly effective work. As in his past three novels, including In the House in the Dark of the Woods (2018), Hunt centers his narrative on a woman. But where those earlier characters faced war, racism, or sorcery, Zorrie Underwood's ordeals may seem less extraordinary. Born early in the 20th century, she is a schoolgirl when she loses her parents to diphtheria. An aunt then raises her and dies when Zorrie is 21. She takes a job painting radium on clocks and gauges, and that lethal chemical sows an early seed of tension. She marries Harold, a good farming man with a hundred acres, but another fellow, the brooding Noah, also catches her eye. She miscarries in her only pregnancy, and then her husband's bomber falls into the sea off Holland in 1943. For years thereafter, Zorrie works her farm and occasionally ponders the troubled Noah, whose story adds an almost gothic sidebar. The novel recalls the small but rich agrarian worlds of Meghan Kenny's The Driest Season (2018) and Mariek Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening (2020). But while those books depict brief periods of their characters' youth, Hunt manages in less than 200 pages to convey his heroine's whole life, telescoping years and rarely departing from seasonal and small-town rhythms. His often lyrical prose traces Zorrie's hopes, griefs, loneliness, and resolve with remarkable economy, although there are occasionally patches that sound forced. Thoughts of Harold find Zorrie musing on "the crisply chiseled tale of time told by the clocks and watches she had once helped paint faces for," and so on for more than 100 words of rhetorical flight. A touching, tightly woven story from an always impressive author. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Deliberately echoing the form of Gustave Flaubert's novella, "A Simple Heart," Hunt celebrates the majesty and depth in a life that may superficially seem undistinguished. Zorrie Underwood is a farmer in central Indiana, and as she and readers survey her 70-or-so years, her joys and sorrows are deeply observed and felt. Raised by a cranky aunt, Zorrie is left homeless at 21, in 1930, and travels though the countryside doing odd jobs for food. Following a stint painting clock faces at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, she settles in her home state and marries a kindly couple's farmer son, enduring setbacks and grief while adhering to daily routines. With compassion and realism, Hunt recounts Zorrie's story straightforwardly, with setting-appropriate dialogue and an eye for sensory details: the glint of fireflies, the clay soil's rich scent, the "mineral-sweet taste of warm blackberries picked off the vines." Zorrie's relationship with her neighbor Noah Summers, the eccentric protagonist of Hunt's Indiana, Indiana (2003), is presented with expressive subtlety. A beautifully written ode to the rural Midwest.

Library Journal Review

Taking an epigraph from Flaubert's A Simple Heart, Hunt's (The Evening Road) novel also concerns a simple, decent character well acquainted with hardship and loss. Zorrie Underwood was orphaned young and spent much of her childhood living with an elderly and embittered aunt who was rarely warm toward her, the harshness of her youth salved only by school and especially Mr. Thomas, her teacher, who heightens her awareness of the natural world. Striking out after high school, she leaves her native Indiana, taking a job painting radium watch dials at a factory in Illinois, where she makes her first real friends among the "radium girls." Returning to Indiana, she comes to live with an older couple, Gus and Bessie Underwood, doing chores and eventually marrying Harold, their son. When Harold is killed in World War II, Zorrie takes over their farm, carving out a life for herself as the years pass by. VERDICT During an early scene, Zorrie and her friends toss flakes of radium paint into the air and stare with wonder at its seemingly miraculous glow. Through an ordinary life of hard work and simple pleasures, Zorrie comes to learn the real wonder is life itself. A quiet, beautifully done, and memorable novel.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA