Book Review: This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live by Melody Warnick

October 27, 2020 Stephanie4 Comments

Like many Americans, I’ve spent the majority of my adult life on the move. At age 40, I’ve lived in seven different towns; this February will mark six years in my current location, which is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since life in my hometown my first eighteen years. And this is a good thing; I love it here. But I haven’t always loved the other places I lived in, and that’s why This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live by Melody Warnick (Viking, 2016) appealed to me so much. Could I have done better? Could I have learned to love the other places I lived? I wanted to know.

Like me, Melody Warnick has spent her adult life as a Mover, packing up every few years in search of a better place, a city that feels like Home with a capital H. Nothing ever felt quite right; happiness always lay beyond, in a different city- maybe one with a waterpark? A better arts festival? Maybe a city with more nature would do the trick. But after her husband accepted a job in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Melody’s first reaction upon arrival was, “Ugh…”, she began to wonder if she could train herself to love a place- if the problem wasn’t with all these cities, but with her avoidance of putting down roots.

Step by step, Ms. Warnick began to devise means of falling in love with her city- in order to love a place, you need to act like someone who loves it, and that means getting involved in a lot of different ways. Part memoir, part personal experiment, part how-to, Melody Warnick instructs a society not used to staying in place on how to enjoy- and maybe even love- the place you’re in, even if it’s not your forever home.

This is absolutely the book I wish someone had handed me before my first big move at 18. I don’t know that it would have made *all* the difference- not where we lived in Tennessee, I’m sure. That town was lovely, the area had so much to do, and I made some wonderful friends, but the city itself is very much run by a Good Ol’ Boys club that terrorizes even lifelong residents; if your vision of what the city could be doesn’t match theirs, you’re no one, and they’ll not only let you know, they’ll let everyone else know, too. It’s hard to love a place like that. But the other places I’ve lived? Ms. Warnick’s book makes me realize I could have and should have done better.

Get involved, Ms. Warnick urged (advice that may not be all that possible right now, or that may not be safe; one of the reasons it took me so long to read this book- over a week!- was that it was just hard. Hard to read about all the things that aren’t possible to do right now, all the things we’re missing out on to keep ourselves and our families safe, all the things that won’t be possible for the foreseeable future…), and she offers suggestion after suggestion of the many possibilities to take part in the running of or enjoyment of your city- from the largest to the smallest, from tiny towns, to your neighborhood or block in a massive city. Putting down roots and feeling attached to a place takes work, and if this isn’t something that comes naturally to you, this book is a road map to falling in love with the place you live in.

I’d been trying to implement some of her suggestions pre-pandemic, and I’ll continue on with new inspiration whenever life resumes as normal (not anytime soon, so it’s a good thing I’m patient and have a plethora of available reading material to wait this out…). Despite my struggles reading it during this pandemic, This Is Where You Belong is chock-full of great advice and should be issued to anyone who packs up a moving truck and heads off in search of happiness in a new city. This is the book that will help you find it.

Do you love where you live? Have you tried? What’s worked for you?

Visit Melody Warnick’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Broken Faith: Broken Faith: Inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, One of America’s Most Dangerous Cults by Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr

September 30, 2020 Stephanie5 Comments

Cults! Cults, cults, cults! This is probably my longest-running fascination. I put in for Broken Faith: Inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, One of America’s Most Dangerous Cults by Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Mohr (Hanover Square Press, 2020) on NetGalley but was rejected (no biggie; you win some, you lose some!), but it went onto my TBR anyway. I hadn’t heard of Word of Faith Fellowship before, so immediately I was deeply intrigued and neeeeeeeeeeeeeeded to know more!

Journalist Mitch Weiss has written a stunning exposé on the Word of Faith Fellowship, a church out of Spindale, North Carolina, that consumes every last moment of its members’ lives. You can’t just show up for a church service; you have to be invited (that alone should tip people off). WOFF is run by Jane Whaley, a charismatic, power-hungry woman who seeks to control the lives of her church members and live high on the hog on their tithes, while they struggle to give more and more. Church tactics include screaming in the faces of and beating members, even infants and small children, to release all the demons that plague them, tying them to chairs, locking them away for months at a time in what amounts to prisons on the church property, stealing members’ children, and making it nearly impossible for members to leave.

What’s worse is the local government is fully involved in protecting the church and has, for decades, turned a blind eye to the abuse of the children in the cult. Members have tried for years to get justice for the many, many ways the cult has wronged them, only to be given the runaround by the police and the local court system. Hopefully with the publication of this book, more people will be aware of the shocking manipulations of this cult and the way it controls its members and the county it’s located in.

This is an absolutely shocking book. Mitch Weiss interviewed over 100 former church members to construct this narrative, as well as seeking out court documents, including a 300+ page document that had never before been released prior to his research. Despite damning evidence of the abuse of the members children (including sexual abuse- the mentions are brief, but they’re in here, so be alert if this is a difficult subject for you to read about), the county opted to tie the hands of social services and leave the children there to be further abused. I’m not going to lie; reading this is chilling. It’s yet another account of how cheap life is here in the United States and how little the lives of everyday people matter. The odds are stacked against us all, and if you’ve got money, you’re free to do as much harm as you want to anyone you want, because money is power.

Multiple times, Weiss and Mohr illustrate, usually through the words of authorities, how difficult it is for former cult members to receive justice: cults keep such tight control over their members that when they do manage to escape, they’re often ill-prepared to live in the outside world, plagued with anxiety and PTSD, and they end up homeless and addicted to various substances as a means of coping- rending them, in the eyes of legal authorities and juries, unreliable as witnesses. And thus cults such as WOFF are allowed to carry on their dangerous, abusive tactics. Members of the church have been convicted of various forms of fraud on the church’s behalf (including unemployment fraud and mail fraud), but Jane Whaley has never been brought up on charges herself.

If reading about cults interests you, you won’t want to miss this. Jane Whaley and her sycophants are dangerous and I’m glad the floodlights are being turned onto the church. I hope this helps its victims receive justice and that more people are sympathetic to what they’ve suffered at the hands of this evil, evil institution.

Follow Mitch Weiss on Twitter here.