A woman from Los Angeles finds herself adrift in Littleburgh, Wisconsin, the industry that employed her having collapsed out from under her. A Black physician, full of optimism, drives back into his Georgia hometown expecting to find it improved. Neither of them is going to get what they came for.
The first is Jaycee Grayson, whose latest misadventure Kirkus reviewed this week — an Angelena stranded in a rural town after the global doll empire she worked for went under, pivoting, opportunist that she is, into a new industry. The second is the hero of Walter White's The Fire in the Flint , newly posted by Standard Ebooks, who comes home to grapple with racial tensions he had assumed were already fading. A farce and a tragedy, read side by side, turn out to be asking the same question: what do you do when the place you belong to has stopped agreeing?
The return that fails is one of literature's oldest engines, and this week it was everywhere. It isn't really a story about travel. It's a story about time — the place stayed put and kept changing, the person who left changed too, and the two changes didn't match.