Review: 'Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put' by Annie B. Jones

A conversational collection of stories about staying close to home and staying true to yourself.

In 2018, my husband returned from his first deployment to Afghanistan, and we wanted to take a short trip to celebrate our reunion. We were living near Savannah, only a couple of hours from Thomasville, Georgia, a town I’d heard about on the From the Front Porch podcast. I knew this small town had a bookstore whose owner I admired from across the internet, as well as a quaint bed and breakfast. Books, food, and nice accommodations? Perfect. We booked it.

I sent Annie B. Jones an Instagram message telling her we would be in the area, and I would love to meet her if she was available. Ever eager to welcome out-of-towners to her shop, Annie came downstairs to greet us and handpicked a stack of books for me. She showed us exactly the hospitality she writes about in her forthcoming book Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put.

Chelsey & Annie in The Bookshop, July 2018.

I’ve always considered Annie a kindred spirit, even though our interactions amount to one bookstore meeting and a handful of Instagram conversations. Reading her book revealed a host of uncanny similarities. Like Annie, I am an old soul and recovering goody-two-shoes. I married young. I am an eldest sister to one younger brother. I am deeply introverted but happy to play the extrovert when needed.

We share personality traits and birth order, but while Annie wrote the (literal) book on staying put, I am one of the leavers.

I left small town Wisconsin for college in Minneapolis, then trekked to Georgia to begin my teaching career. I followed my husband to Oklahoma while he completed Field Artillery School then moved all the way across the country to northern New York where we welcomed our first baby. We inched closer to home with a move back to the Midwest, getting to know Iowa and its many corn fields.

Now, I’m back in Wisconsin. I’m in the same place where I grew up, but I’m not the same person at all. Well, that isn’t true. In her collection of lessons, Annie reveals how our younger selves shape our adult life in unexpected ways. We never truly let go of our core traits and dreams, so I am still a lover of the library, still filled with a desire to live a creative life, still in love with the boy I met when I was 17. But my experiences in different pockets of the United States have changed me.

I’ve learned how to make the most of temporary homes and temporary friends. It’s exciting to get a fresh start every three years; it is also exhausting. Annie offers an appealing vision of a quiet and intentional life in one place. She shares ideas for getting settled while also branching out, not in a self-help way, but as an older sister looking back at her choices and offering well-earned perspective. Annie is wise, but winsome.

In short vignettes and conversational reflections, Annie shows how to be steadfast in the face of a fast-paced, ever-shifting world. She writes about how a person can be shaped by a place on a map. She writes about the importance of friendships and fun. She writes about faith, marriage, and being a daughter. Like all essay collections, some pieces will stick with me more than others, whether for their themes or for their craft, but I loved spending time with Annie on every page.

I hope she is collecting more stories to tell us—I know, thanks to her encouragement, I will be collecting my own.

For a short read that goes down easy like a glass of sweet tea, pre-order Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put—out April 22, 2025—from The Bookshelf.

P.S. If you want a dose of warm-fuzzies, take a look at

Hunter Mclendon

’s review of Ordinary Time on Instagram.

P.P.S. I received an early e-ARC of this title via NetGalley. All opinions are my own and uncompensated.