Didn’t love the way in which we are fully thrown into the story - found it to be more confusing than immersive.

Had been looking forward to reading this book. Sadly it wasn’t for me. It just lacked a good plot to get you excited and wanting more. It was very slow paced and never picked up

Beautiful, delikate, frigile. Lyrical. There is no right way to talk about this book. You have to read it and feel it.
Enjoy

*Many thanks to Laird Hunt, Quercus Books, and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
A moving story of a woman whose childhood and young days during the Great Depression symbolize those days. Zorrie's life is simple, filled with love for a brief moment and hard work on a farm.
A quiet novel about an ordinary and modest woman.

Zorrie is a quiet, retrospective on the protagonist Zorrie’s life. It looks at the magic and peace that comes in small everyday events and the ways lives are touched by one another.

Zorrie for most of the book is like an elderly Anne of Green Gables with just a tad less joy but all the wholesomeness.

Not much comes of anything in this story and it is peaceful and nice to dip into. Very enjoyable and I highlighted many parts to come back to and reread.

This is a very sad story, a story that it's better read when you're not ill or feeling down.
I loved the style of writing and loved Zorrie, a realistic and fleshed out characters.
This is the story of her life, her grief and her dreams.
It's not a long book but it's emotionally charged and brilliant.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A small masterpiece. The life of an ordinary woman - although of course no one is really ordinary. A humble life, sometimes a difficult one, with losses and sorrows and grief, but also kindness and courage and hope. Zorrie Underwood is someone I will never forget. Compassionate, generous and insightful, this is a wonderful book, understated but powerful, with nuanced and perceptive characterisation, spare writing with not a word wasted, atmospheric and deeply moving. A real gem of a novel.

A short novel spanning the history of the United States and telling the story of Zorrie, an orphan girl drifting from one place to another to survive, from the great Depression, to being a hopeful radium girl, to epidemics, WW2 and beyond. It reminded me in part of Steinbeck’s characters but the direct reference is to Gustave Flaubert’s novella A Simple Heart, also a study of a kind-hearted maid in dire conditions. Humble characters rendered through amazing, compassionate nuanced characterisation: luminous, deep, raw, delicate, tender and monumental like an epic of the humble unfolding on the majestic backdrop of #Indiana and rural America, which made me think of Andrew Wyeth's paintings. There’s love, loss, grief, loneliness and community, rejection and ultimately resilience, a mesmerising condensation of many themes from the great American novel, and deservedly shortlisted for the U.S. National Book Awards

This deceptively short novel follows the life of Zorrie Underwood through her life, taking us on a whistle-stop tour from her childhood to her as an older woman.

The story is told with a beautifully detached third-person narrative, which will at times skip over several years (or decades) and sometimes zoom in on the smallest details, and there is something that is somehow heartbreaking about the way it skips over certain years as if to leave them unsaid.

The book itself deals strongly with the unsaid- Zorrie is often afraid to fully speak her mind, and appears almost as if she is passively letting life go by her. But what is revealed instead is a real core of strength to this woman, who will privately mourn the death of her husband while also making sure that everyone in her community has what they need, and it quickly becomes clear that the community is struggling.

The writing is taut and beautiful, capturing a great deal in very few words, and brings the book to a generous and shimmering finish.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Zorrie is an orphan left penniless when her aunt dies in 1930. She walks the country picking up casual work, eventually finding a job with the Radium Dial Company in Illinois and with it two friends who teach her how to live. Two months later, she sets off again, finding work with a kindly couple who introduce this hard-working, thoughtful young woman to their son Harold, delighted when love flowers between them. It’s a happy marriage, weathering loss and heartache until Harold joins the air force in 1942. Life becomes lonelier but Zorrie finds ways to deal with her sadness. As the years roll by, she thinks about her Illinois friends, entertains the possibility of love and expands the farm, always accompanied by her beloved dog.

Laird’s perceptive characterisation echoes Elizabeth Strout’s in this quietly understated story of a woman’s life lived simply but well. It’s a life marked by small tragedies, not unlike those around her, but it has its rewards. Nature is celebrated in lovely, painterly descriptions marking the seasons as Zorrie observes her farm and its surroundings.. A small gem of a novel, destined to be one of my books of 2022 for sure.

Zorrie is the story of one woman’s life, a life of hard work, kindness, loss, resilience and acceptance. It’s simply and beautifully told, so much so that I didn’t expect how sad and emotional I was at the end. It got under my skin without me knowing it. Zorrie never seems angry, (which I guess is where there are parallels with Flaubert’s A Simple Heart which is quoted at the beginning of the book.) although there were many occasions I was angry for her. A quiet little book with hidden strength.

A story of a life told skilfully. Mental health, radium, Alzheimer, death and struggle form the interpunction to everyday farm work in rural America.
She said whoever invented tears had taken out a patent, because there was big money in them.

I thought the author was female, but the reading by Laird on the National Book Award website proved me wrong: https://www.nationalbook.org/books/zorrie/

Zorrie in a sense feels comparable to Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: short and with the feeling of being artisanal in linear storytelling. Laird Hunt starts of the story with elder Zorrie Underwood looking back on her life, the beginning is like a fairytale, with an orphan and an evil/bitter aunt. The importance of teachers is also illustrated. Soon she moves from the Depression struck countryside of Indiana to Ottowa, where we have a brief passage that brings The Radium Girls and the dreadful history of radioactivity on brushes, which the girl bring to their mouths to paint watch faces, to the story.
First this "Luna powder" is seen as a health supplement and is liberally mixed into food or in the water when one is pregnant.

There is love, there is Alzheimer, war and death, struggle and mourning. Much is left unspoken or without words from the characters to express.
Solace is found both in loneliness, pets and the healing power of music
We visit psychiatric wards and marriages that aren't what they seem.
Longing, rejection, things better left unspoken.

In the end I feel this book captures very well the sensation of ageing and life, in a quiet manner.
I enjoyed being in the company of Zorrie, seeing some glimpses of my home country The Netherlands, and in general following her life in the precise language of Hunt:
Zorrie squinted up as she walked home and thought that this sky and clear light must mean something, or ought to if it didn’t.

‘Zorrie’ is set in mid- 20th century rural Indiana. It is very well written and I think part of its appeal, in these turbulent times, is that evokes an ‘innocent’ America in the not so distant past that no longer exists (or perhaps never existed). It is a simple story, told in a simple style, about the relatively simple life of Zorrie. We follow her in her loneliness, friendships, marriage and old age.

I thought it was really well done. Most of the time I want my literature to be innovative and push boundaries, but at times a straightforward story is refreshing and it is good to be reminded that in most lives nothing spectacular happens, but that doesn’t make them devoid of meaning or purpose.

Many thanks to Quercus and Netgalley for the ARC!

In 1930, Zorrie, orphaned and left alone after the death of the aunt who raised her, goes looking for a job. After a brief stunt as a radium girl, she finds work on farm - and a husband.
This is a quiet novel - and a very short one - of Zorrie's life, between her in-laws, her neighbours, her husband Harold ("the best-looking fellow Zorrie would ever see"). There is no drama, every major life event is told... quietly and gently, often years after they took place, as each chapter shows Zorrie a few years older and has the reader catching up with her and the neighbours. It feels like this too - catching up with someone every few years, with a cup of coffee, listening to what they went through. There are feelings but they are somewhat discrete and toned down. I found it incredibly touching and powerful in its quiet and gentle way... I really, really enjoyed it and it is probably one of my favourite books this year.

Unfortunately this one didn't work for me.

It is beautifully, at times stunningly, written at the sentence level. And I can see what the author is doing in terms of writing about a simple/ordinary life in this way.

But the result for me made for a rather boring read with "fascinating" discussions of ride-on lawnmowers etc.

And in 2021, I struggle with a novel that takes, implicitly, as representative of an ordinary life a English-speaking, white, mid-west American, heterosexual, cis-gender one.

One many will enjoy but not for me.

A simply stunningly written, understated novella which in less than 200 pages tells the story of not just a life but of the large part of the 20th Century in midwestern America – through the 1920s and the pre-vaccination Diphtheria outbreaks, the 1930s and the Great Depression as well as the tale of the so-called Radium Girls, the 1940s and the impact of World War II on those left behind and then through the post war years to more modern times.

A book I think for fans of Marilynne Robinson in particular, although with, as discussed below, a number of other literary precedents including Woolf and Flaubert.

The eponymous third party character was effectively orphaned twice over (her parents dying of illness when she was very young, and her distant, strict and reluctant Guardian Aunt of a stroke when Zorrie was 21). From there she drifted in search of jobs, often homeless, before finding something of a place at a factory where she paints luminous dials – before feeling a need to return to Indiana where to her surprise she settles into married life, a smallholding in a farming community and then later long years of widowhood.

Another key character is actually the main narrator (I believe) of the author’s earlier and hard to source (at least in the UK) novel “Indiana, Indiana” – Noah Summers, whose wife Opal has been, to his despair, institutionalised for arson and self-harm.

In the acknowledgements the author mentions four books he “kept close to him” as he wrote: “A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert, “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf, “The Histories” of Herodotus, “The Essays” by Michel Montaigne and “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank.

The first of these provides the book’s official attributed epigraph, its Part structure and most importantly its concept – the idea (as suggested as an exercise by Georges Sand to Flaubert) of moving from a harsh and satirical style to a more compassionate one, and of using sophisticated writing to examine what superficially can be dismissed as a simple life and a standard narrative. Laird Hunt I believe has previously written a number of more experimental books and more transgressive ones so his range here is extremely impressive.

The second provides a series of unattributed epigraphs at the start of each Part, one of which is deliberately rearranged by one of the characters, and one I could not source, but which together set out some of the themes and ideas of each chapter as well as collectively effectively forming some prose poetry which might serve as a review of this novel – my collation below

out of this shadow into this sun
running together, the day falls copiously
no shining roof or glittering window
this Palace seems light as a cloud set for a moment in the sky
Our hands touch our bodies burst into fire
And soft green passages and blurry lemon highlights

The third and fourth are read by characters in the novel – a copy of the fourth and an inscription in it by its deeply philosophical owner “the fragile film of the present must be butressed against the past” forming almost an self-generated epigraph.

And the fifth deeply affects Zorrie after a late-life trip to Amsterdam and causes her to re-examine her attitude to her own struggles through life.

As well as a beautifully written tale with strong literary precedents, this is also a book of imagery and themes. Recurring ideas include: dreams and the boundaries between sleep and waking; ghosts and haunting; grief, mourning and healing – remembering and forgetting; both the linear passing and the seasonal circularity of time; illumination and radiation.

Highly recommended.