After losing both her parents and her aunt, Zorrie is cast into the perilous realities of rural Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survives 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 glow from the radioactive material and are dubbed the ‘ghost girls.’
When Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finds the love and community that has always eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg, but discovers that her trials have only begun. The author gives us a poignant poetic novel about a woman searching for her place in the world and finding it in the daily rhythms of life in rural Indiana. This short book reads like a long one, as it spans a life. It is a quiet American classic that has some beautiful writing–Laird Hunt certainly has a special way with words. It is very much in the style of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Wendell Berry.
Joanne's Reading Blog 
I liked this book very much. Several weeks ago we drove from our home in St Paul to Cleveland to visit family there and we stayed over night in Ottawa, Illinois, which is where there was a radium processing plant referred to in Zorrie. There is also a nonfiction book, Radium Girls, on that subject. Ottawa was also the site of the first Lincoln-Douglas Debate. I recommend the most recent Laird Hunt book, a seres of linked short stories, Float Up, Sing Down.
Thanks for your suggestion for my next Hunt book. I really enjoyed this first one of his I’ve read. I found the whole radium processing plant aspect of the novel to be so interesting, and was something I never knew about. I’ll definitely have a look at Radium Girls.