Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put

From the Front Porch podcaster Jones debuts with a chatty if undercooked memoir-in-essays on the joys and sorrows of small-town life. Centering the collection in Thomasville, a small town in rural south Georgia where she moved in early adulthood and has remained despite once dreaming of becoming a big-city journalist, Jones is at her strongest when discussing the bookstore she first managed and now owns. “Sweat Equity,” for example, finds the author, then in her mid-20s, leaving a job in legal reporting in hopes that “maybe a bookstore would bring meaning into my life.” She goes on to describe the unexpected emotional hardships and rewards of the work (“The magic of it—because there is magic to it—is never lost on me”). In “Obituaries,” Jones explains that running a small-town business involves “googling... death notices” to learn the fate of absent customers, and describes being unprepared for “how deep my grief for them might go” (such seemingly casual relationships are often those that make “life worth living,” she observes). Unfortunately, Jones too often flattens her stories by telling rather than showing, resulting in a collection whose charming moments get lost amid all the clichés (“Life... isn’t always like the books we read. It’s messier”). Readers will be left wanting. (Apr.)