This books is about the impact of racism, hate crimes, loss and grief. It's an in-depth exploration of what it's like to be a minority in the UK and constantly questioned about whether you belong. The author walks the Pennine way and finds healing in nature.

It's very in depth and contains lots of facts and figures about nature, climate change, mental health and racism.
As a person of colour I was hoping to get lost in the story and feel closer to nature and feel a sense of belonging but the amount of facts and figures and repitition left me feeling disconnected.

I started off really enjoying this book, the account of the racial hate crime against Anita was truly horrifying and her description of how the railway staff and the police dealt with it was well written.

However, I did not enjoy the parts of the book that talked about meanings of words i.e the meaning of 'to bear' or the parts that described what we as humans witness. I skipped over these parts as I did not feel they added depth to the story,

I tried really hard to get back into the story but I had lost the plot and lost the feel of the story, I quickly gave up trying to enjoy this book.

Sadly I didn’t enjoy this book at all.
As a Northern lady, born and bred, living in one of the areas the author was due to walk through I was excited to see how she would portray my beautiful home. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was actually angry and frustrated at times to see how woefully under-prepared, poorly equipped and badly planned the visits and walking was. To be navigating solely using a mobile phone is one of the biggest dangers and most frequent reason for call out of our local Mountain Rescue teams.
However I think this will be mostly overlooked as the amount of actual ‘travel blog’ is so minuscule in the grand scheme of the book and anyone wanting to read an actual walking insight will walk away from it. The walk seemed like an afterthought – a sideline that could be used to crowbar in all the heavy and unpleasant topics the author wants to air.
I have no doubt that the book will receive amazing critical acclaim as you can tell how well written and thoroughly researched it is, with primary and secondary evidence sources and quotes coming out of its ears. But it is this approach that makes it feel like wading through a complex university textbook (the references section is over 10 pages long) on Women’s Studies. I found it too big, it tackles just about every negative and challenging topic our country faces now or has ever faced (with the exception of drug addiction I think) including racism, PTSD, anxiety, depression, asylum seekers and immigration, homelessness, bullying, suicide, death, deforestation, climate change and many, many more. I felt pummeled and threatened at every page turn and not in a constructive ‘forward progress’ way. Maybe it is because I suffer myself with mental health challenges I just couldn’t cope with being confronted by it constantly.

If you are studying for your dissertation then this is the book for you, if you want an enjoyable read about the Pennine Way, it very much isn’t.

I Belong Here is a wonderful, thought provoking and moving book.
"I am here because you were there"
I was drawn to it after reading The Salt Path, which I loved, and I thought this would be similar. In a way it is, but there is an extra layer in Sethi's book.
After an horrific racist attack on a train and the death of a friend, Sethi plans her journey through the Pennines, 'the backbone of Britain'.
What follows is a journey, not only through the Northern countryside, but through nature and history, both of place and the author's personal history also.
The kindness of the people she meets on her way is heartwarming and a complete contrast to some of the terrible treatment Sethi details in her experience as a woman of colour growing up in Britain.
This book is full of wildlife, landscape, history and the power of language.
A wonderful book to read during a lockdown as Sethi's fabulous prose makes you feel as if you are firmly in that landscape with her.
Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to read this based on the title and the write up on the back of the book .
I live fairly close to the Pennines in Cumbria and wanted to have another's perspective of the many walks I had taken along it's stretch and share in the beauty and rawness of the area.
Sadly I did not feel my love for the area was shared through eyes of the author.
This was much less a book about nature and hiking but more of a self help book for the writer herself. Whilst I agree that Anita has been racially wronged in the most awful of ways I did not feel like this was expressed in a way that gave us ( the reader ) an insight to how this helped her by walking the Pennines.
The constant referencing to other books, poems , dictionaries etc also jarred .

'I Belong Here' is quite a different book to the those it'll probably share shelf-space with in bookshops. Perhaps it is closest to 'The Salt Path' (which the author references), in exploring the restorative power of walking through nature after a life-altering experience. Yet it devotes less word count to the walking journey than I expected, which frustrated me a little, although that is because so much else is woven into the narrative - Anita Sethi's experience during and after the racial attack on her; her childhood experiences of racism; reflections on the human body; histories of black and brown people in the UK; histories of walking; geology; and the global environmental crisis. Some of these aspects worked, particularly those about race, although some held less interest for me; I found my attention wandering during the passages describing parts of the human body and they felt a little self-indulgent/unnecessary.

This is not the book for you if you are looking for a simple start-to-end recounting of a walk (like Cheryl Strayed's 'Wild'). But it is tender and thoughtful. It turns out to be something of a love letter to the northern British landscape, and the people living there - I found myself constantly braced for Sethi to encounter racist attitudes and micro-aggressions, but in fact, there was only one instance where someone made her feel less than welcome with a "where are you from?" question. Everyone else she met on her multi-stage journey was kind, open, and generous. It makes me want to go hiking in the North right now!!!

One more thing I enjoyed about this book - Sethi was completely honest about her patchy ability to name flora and fauna (something I share). Many times, she sees a beautiful plant, or hears a bird's cry, and acknowledges she doesn't know what it is, though the experience still moves her. It's quite refreshing after having read so much nature-writing that prides itself on littering paragraphs with as many species names as possible, and the book feels all the more accessible for it.

(With thanks to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for a copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review)

I love writing about nature journeys, and I love political writing about identity, race and belonging, and this book is a fantastic combination of the two.

Starting with a racist attack on a train and the death of a close friend, Sethi details how this formed part of her decision to follow the Wainwright trail through the Pennines to Hadrian's Wall.

What follows is a beautiful, intriguing and luscious journey through nature, as Sethi reflects on how the natural world and the environment interact with notions of identity, belonging, nationhood, language and place. This becomes even more poignant when she starts reflecting on the racist attack and her friend's death, and how her walk through nature provides not only the mental break needed to process them, but also the numerous interactions with the people on her trip. Relying on kindness of strangers allows her to begin to ease into her skin again, and feel a sense of belonging, and she describes beautifully how people of colour have a longer history in the UK than people often think, which responds excellently to her attacker, and you get the feeling that she is winning out by writing this.

Her investigations into language and its connection to place are also fascinating. She weaves beautiful patterns between words used for natural phenomenon, like "fell", "force" and "scar", and their relationships to violence, and it feels like cathartic release as she details their definitions and applications in both worlds.

It took me a little bit to get into the book, partly because I found the introductory section especially jarring. This was because it essentially gave a synopsis of the book in what felt like a rushed sprint through the entire plot and journey, never lingering long enough on anything, so that when the book began properly, the power of some of the earlier moments felt weakened. This meant that the beginning did not seem to strike much of a balance between the discussions of identity and the descriptions of environment, and felt as if it flitted between both.

That said, once Sethi herself settles into the walking journey itself, the book fittingly settles into an even and powerful rhythm that drives this beautiful and important book forward, and it reaches a conclusion that is heartwarming, poignant, powerful and empowering.

I received an advance copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.