... lovely ... a virtuosic portrait of midcentury America itself — physically stalwart, unerringly generous, hopeful that tragedy can be mitigated through faith in land and neighbor alike ... Hunt is not shy about his elegant ambitions with this small novel. The epigraph is from Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. The chapter titles are from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. This is not fiction as literary uproar. This is a refined realism of the sort Flaubert himself championed, storytelling that accrues detail by lean detail ... Hunt’s prose is galvanized by powerful questions ... What Hunt ultimately gives us is a pure and shining book, an America where community becomes a 'symphony of souls,' a sustenance greater than romance or material wealth for those wise enough to join in.
... a slight but poignant chronicle ... 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 ... 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.
...meditative, eerie, and beautiful ... Hunt’s touch here is so gentle ... The novel’s simplicity, at first inviting, becomes disarming. Zorrie is living a life that we know will be shortened ... Here, about halfway through the novel, Hunt further undoes the trusswork of a journey tale. The novel undergoes a tonal shift that turns a placidly told story with undertones of tragedy into something more dreamlike. The language becomes more ethereal and suggestive, and the sentences stretch out ... It’s as if a Marilynne Robinson novel got microdosed.
