Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an e-arc of this book. My opinions are my own.

I was very excited to read this book. I love nature and have always been interested in the (magical) history of ancient places, of which there are many in the UK. To read a personal story of a young woman discovering more about these places in search of magic, seemed like something right up my alley. Unfortunately I couldn't connect with the author. Personally I felt like she kept saying she had an open mind, but her actions said otherwise.
This book unfortunately wasn't for me.

I was intrigued by the premise of the book: reconnecting with the land to find the magic in the landscape and experiencing transcendence. The author had a real yearning to find a place where she belonged and felt connected to, which seemed like a reasonable goal in today’s busy virtual world.

However, the progress towards that goal was continually sabotaged by the author herself. Reddy found plenty of fascinating people to talk to and beautiful places to go. I was enjoying her descriptions, but then she became suddenly self-conscious and dully introspective or just got bored and stopped paying attention. On to the next thing.

Conjuring the landscape in the minds of readers is difficult if you have no interest in the names of plants, birds and insects and finding inner peace is difficult if you keep getting bored and wandering off. A great premise for a book with sometimes frustrating execution.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

Wanderland is a book recounting Jini Reddy's attempt to find magic in the countryside. To me that is a very personal thing - some people feel a connection to a view, others to trees or animals or birds and it is something along these lines and more, that Reddy sets out to explore.

I found it fascinating to read. I really liked that the author wasn't fully positive about everything she wrote about. It felt like an honest account. When she didn't feel a connection, she said that. In one of her expeditions, Reddy sets out with a friend to discover a spring following a treasure map. But the weather is not good and the friend doesn't want to explicitly follow the map. So, it's not a particularly successful weekend away and yet it's retelling is still relevant and adds something to the book as a whole.

Reddy is a London journalist with a multicultural background. Several times in the book she makes references to feeling 'other' in the landscape - sometimes I felt this was partly alluding to race and sometimes it was more than that, perhaps relating to the almost nomadic nature of her lifestyle. I admired the solo travelling and staying in unusual settings with interesting hosts. My only criticism is that I felt the book could or should have been longer, exploring a few more themes, for example the stone circles that the author admits she avoids but which seem to have some magical significance for many people.

Thank you to NetGalley for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In troubled times, particularly over the last year many have sought solace n the beauty of nature and the great outdoors Jini Reddy went further and embarked on a quest for the mystical.

In her career as a travel writer she had experienced many eye opening experiences in a variety of locations . Now she longed to find her place and overcome her pain of being overlooked.

This book tells of journeys, both inward and outbound and how the author found a sense of belonging in the wild.

Perfectly placed for anyone who enjoys nature writing but worries that the current crop leans too consistently white and male, Jini Reddy is "British by birth, Indian by descent, Canadian by upbringing, South African via my parents' birthplace", and this book is her account of trying to work through her own relationship to the British landscape while always feeling like an outsider. Not solely by reason of her heritage, either: "I often felt too conventional for the pagans, too esoteric for the hardcore wildlife tribe, not deep enough for the deep ecologists, not logical enough for the scientists, not 'listy' enough for the birders, not enough of a 'green thumb' for the gardeners." And even beyond that, in a sentence that really captured a frustration I often feel nagging at me, "Call me sentimental but I wanted something more than to walk through an alluring landscape and admire its beauty. I wanted somehow to be more porous." So Wanderland follows a series of attempts to scratch that itch, to find a way to connect with nature that feels right. Its dominant mood is that frustration when you desperately want something special to happen, but some Porlock element or other, which may be interior or exterior, gets in the way. A loquacious tourist spoils Reddy's communion with a sunset; a woman who seems like a potential mentor, and has been talking about her mystic rapport with animals, visibly crumbles when she's unable to do anything about a swift trapped in a church. The one where I really felt for Reddy was when a friend who's joined her for a walk-cum-quest refuses to properly follow the treasure map in their possession – seriously, what kind of person, with a treasure map in the party, would behave like that? But equally, Reddy knows that everyone's connection is a deeply subjective and individual thing, and frustrations are inevitable when they intersect, as with the friend who insists on photographing every flower they pass. It could easily have been played as the often trying 'What am I like?' comedy take on the personal journey, were it not for the real yearning underneath it – but equally, it never quite tips over into wide-eyed woo, with Reddy in a Glastonbury occult tat shop feeling "like I've eaten one too many sweets".

Undoubtedly some readers will wonder how much of an outsider someone can really feel when they're having tea and scones and watching the cricket with their brother-in-law, who owns a small wood in Kent, but that's the thing about being an outsider – no token of admission is ever quite enough to entirely shake the feeling and drop your guard. Noticeable throughout is the way that Reddy thinks twice before visiting certain locations, pubs in particular, in a way you wouldn't tend to find in most books of this sort. Mercifully, her fears seldon turn out to be justified – or at least, not in any overt sense – but she powerfully conveys how exhausting the learned defensiveness and second-guessing can be. I felt a particular twinge of concern on her behalf when her travels took her to Looe. I recognised her description of the lushness of the countryside on the journey there from Liskeard, but also, it's the only place I've ever found a Black & White Minstrels CD - yes, CD, not some old seventies vinyl, FFS – in a charity shop.

I'm sure Wanderland will be too serious for some, too woo for others; there'll be people where the prickliness isn't what they're after in nature writing, others who get frustrated by Reddy's tendency to bounce off many of her investigations. But that's a big part of the point of the exercise – nature writing should have room for different styles, not all of them to everyone's taste, rather than all fitting one approved template of writer or writing. And surely only the most full hippy reader could fail to sympathise with Reddy trying to get her head around the unsuccessful swift-whisperer's take on Merlin, a pre-Christian versions apparently of her own invention: "she describes him variously as a spirit of nature, 'the spirit in its masculine form', and a priest of nature. Is it any wonder I'm confused?" Though in all that, I see I've forgotten to mention that Wanderland does also have plenty of the stuff for which people come to the genre in the first place, as in the evocative descriptions of wood, water, wild, and the experience of being in them. Which said, I think my favourite might be about a man-made, if suitably ancient, part of the landscape, Glastonbury Tor: "It looks a little forlorn, if such a thing could be said of a tower. Like a matriarch who has lost every member of her family but endures, straight-backed."

(Netgalley ARC)