This Is Where You Belong

The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live

By: Melody Warnick

Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie

In the spirit of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project and Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss, a journalist embarks on a project to discover what it takes to love where you live.

The average restless American will move 11.7 times in a lifetime. For Melody Warnick, it was her sixth move - from Austin, Texas, to Blacksburg, Virginia - that threatened to unhinge her. In the lonely aftermath of unpacking, she wondered: Aren't we supposed to put down roots at some point? How does the place we live become the place we want to stay? This time she had an epiphany. Rather than hold her breath and hope this new town would be her family's perfect fit, she would figure out how to fall in love with it - no matter what.

How we come to feel at home in our towns and cities is what Warnick sets out to discover in This Is Where You Belong. She dives into the body of research around place attachment - the deep sense of connection that binds some of us to our cities and increases our physical and emotional well-being - then travels to towns across America to see it in action. Inspired by a growing movement of placemaking, she examines what its practitioners are doing to create likable locales. She also speaks with frequent movers and loyal stayers around the country to learn what draws highly mobile Americans to a new city and what makes us stay. The best ideas she imports to her adopted hometown of Blacksburg for a series of "Love Where You Live" experiments designed to make her feel more locally connected: dining with her neighbors, shopping Small Business Saturday, marching in the town Christmas parade.

Can these efforts make a halfhearted resident happier? Will Blacksburg be the place she finally stays? What Warnick learns will inspire you to embrace your own community - and perhaps discover that the place where you live right now...is home.

©2016 Melody Warnick (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Interesting

Interesting book with author sharing her own personal journey and that of others as well as research findings.

Book was great, narration was terrible

I really enjoyed the book. I finished it feeling hopeful. However, the narration irked me to no end. It was very robotic (I actually checked multiple times to see if AI was reading it). There are multiple words mispronounced. Very annoying. But the book was good enough that I still finished it!

Lots of engaging and actionable ways to love the place you live... with some REALLY annoying narration quirks

I am planning to do so many of the things that Warnick attempted in her “love where you live” experiment. Honestly, I feel like I love the place I live more just by thinking about the possibilities.

BUT the narration is super annoying. I was areadu not a huge fan of the narrator’s delivery, but there are a lot of plain old mistakes here. How would you pronounce the year “2007”? MacDuffie says “twenty-o-seven” EVERY TIME. With as much research as there is in this book, there are a lot of dates and this gets old real fast. She also randomly mispronounces a lot of words like “Herculean.” The book was not changed at all to make it make sense for audiobook (there are times when she’ll say a town name, then “pronounced <repeat town name>”—we know, you just said it). Plus, the editing is just no good, there are phrases/sentences that are repeated twice. I could go on. Usually, I don’t give the narrator grief for stuff like this, but it needlessly marred the listening experience. I would still buy this audiobook again and would recommend it, but just be aware that this stuff can drive you crazy.

Great for anyone who recently moved or is struggling to love where they are!

Highly recommend this book! It gives you hacks and experiments to help you love where you live—without waiting for time to help you!

Book is good enough to overcome the terrible narration

ChatGPT or it’s sister narrated this book. It’s awful. Nevertheless I enjoyed the book enough to not give up in chapter 1 and enjoyed all the context. The narrator not so much.