• This Is Where You Belong

  • The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live
  • By: Melody Warnick
  • Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
  • Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (273 ratings)

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This Is Where You Belong  By  cover art

This Is Where You Belong

By: Melody Warnick
Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
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Publisher's summary

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.

What listeners say about This Is Where You Belong

Average customer ratings
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Look beyond yourself!

Great book for those who have a hard time feeling like they fit into a community. I took away some tangible goals to help get plugged in to my neighborhood/town. Overall, I think this is a book that is aimed to challenge you to think beyond your own world and care deeper about those around you.

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6 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Perfect book for frequent movers

The author provides great ideas/suggestions on how to make the most of where you live right now through live where you live mini experiments and suggestions for meeting neighbors. As a Military Spouse of fifteen years and living in our first bought home, this book was easily relatable and convinced me to do more in and for our community.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Common sense & a waste of time!

Wow, ok, so if you’re not a millennial saddled with student debt, strategically choosing where you live based off of walkability and public transport because you don’t own a car and actually like socializing with other human beings, than maybe this book can be helpful. I’ve heard from snobby rich expats who don’t do their own grocery shopping and never walk or take public transit or speak to any locals that this book was so surprising! The narration is also terrible. Bad, bad, unnatural pacing.

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2 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

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.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

the privilege to move home alot

I was enjoyong this book for its interesting summary of different aspects of living in various towns and the authors new home until I got to this part... "Roots ran deep here, even if they weren't my own, Smith Plantation went on my asset map"
This quote is from the author while mapping the pros and cons of her new home in Blacksburg. She recounts visiting a plantation and appreciating why the owner built it as a good place to be "place attached". Just a few sentences before this she let us know there were a lot of slaves living there. Pretty tone deaf if you ask me from a book about finding a good place to live to skim over the history of the forced residence of slave labor. There's no follow up on the topic, it then moves straight to football. I get that it's not a history book but it just bugs me that it's written from the perspective of lacking compassionate depth on this topic.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Distracting mispronunciations

Some basic info that could have been conveyed in a shorter book, but still some value here. the narrator mispronounces words enough that it got annoying.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

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!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

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!

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Performance could be better

As someone who has not moved a lot in my life, you might wonder why I would want to listen to this book. I live in a place that is not the friendliest to outsiders. After living in my community for five plus years I am still struggling to build a community and thought this book could help me develop some strategies. I was able to get lots of good action items from this book - but it was definitely focused on being a city/urban environment. I live in a more rural area and although there are definitely action items I could take from the book. The one thing that I found detracting was the narrator - the pronunciation of corollary (at least I have to guess that was the word they were going for....) was distracting. Overall, I think would recommend this book to anyone seeking ideas for community building. It would be a great moving/new house gift as well.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

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.

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