Review of Zorrie by Laird Hunt

*Zorrie* by Laird Hunt (2021). Published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

Among my many other interests as of late, I’ve been on a kick for literature that’s about the Midwest and the South, especially if it’s set during the period in which the Dust Bowl and World War II happened. I don’t know why I am being this way, but that’s just how it turned out to be as of late.

Because I have a remote internship at the Smithsonian and have trouble sitting at my desk for long periods of time, I ended up getting another habit of listening to audiobooks while I’m doing my work on 1.5x times speed.

Long story, but I’ve somehow trained myself to listen to books on 2x speed for graduate school and it actually, honest to God, works.

Zorrie is one of those books I randomly found on Libby and just started listening to after I finished Another Brooklyn (which the review is on my blog, check it out!). I took longer to listen to this one because I found the plot a bit drawn out for the format of an audiobook—I’ll go into the summarized version of events below, but it essentially follows the course of the main protagonist’s life.

I wanted to give this story justice, so I ended up listening on 1.25x speed and finishing it over the course of several days.

I’ve rambled enough—let’s dive into the review!

The story of one Indiana woman as she learns to make it on her own in the world.

The protagonist of Zorrie is aptly named Zorrie, and the story begins with her coming-of-age tale. Her parents died when she was younger, leaving her with no one except for an aunt to take care of her. Zorrie never left her little county at the beginning of her life, but when her aunt dies, too, she’s forced to go out and find a path in the world all by herself.

This is during the Great Depression and the beginnings of the Dust Bowl, so when Zorrie ends up leaving, she has to go west in order to try and find odd jobs. At one point, she even turns up at a former teacher’s home in search of shelter and some advice to keep moving forward.

Eventually, Zorrie ends up at a radium processing plant. As typical of the era, the girls working there are encouraged to lick the paint brushes, and the conditions, as we know as a modern audience, are unsafe considering how they end up handling the radium throughout their tenures there.

Eventually, after bonding with the girls and her fellow workers there, Zorrie packs up her things and returns back to her farming roots. She gets married to a man and they start a farm, but tragedy is soon to strike her life yet again.

After returning to Indiana and putting down her roots with her husband on their farm, her husband is called to serve in the midst of World War II. She is forced to watch him go off to Europe to fight in the biggest worldly conflict the world has seen, and when his letters stop arriving, she has to come to terms with the fact he has died.

And when the notice arrives, Zorrie is left to fend for herself yet again. It seems like the world is cruel to this one character, but if we know it already, she’s going to come through it victorious.

The good remainder of the novel is spent exploring Zorrie’s grief at everything that has happened, especially the death of her husband, and trying to navigate life as she gets older.

We see she starts to have troubles remembering and moving about on the farm, and when other events begin happening to the people closest to her, it adds completely new challenges for her to get through at the end of the day.

One might call this a sobering, depressing book at times, but it’s definitely one about resilience in a woman who probably would not have had representation in her own era.

Overall Thoughts

I genuinely thought this was a fascinating book, despite it trying to be an epic, grand tale. In the past I think a book like this would’ve been split into multiple different ones, and I wish this one could’ve been split so that we spend more time in each stage of Zorrie’s life and what happens then.

The writing was really good in this book, but I think I wanted it to push more and stop being so mellow and quiet. It contextualizes a specific woman in a specific moment and place in history, and there seems to be something missing throughout its narrative for me.

But it was still an excellent listen (or read, if you would prefer).

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