A review of a book we edited, Rural Transformations and Rural Crime (Bowden & Harkness, 2022) was published in Volume 32, Issue 3 of Rural Society (Scott, 2023) in December 2023. The review makes two key but highly misleading charges. The first is an intimation that rural criminology is dominated by a clique of scholars" and second that the book by and large lacks critical analysis to the reviewer's liking. The reviewer provides a glimpse of a broad analysis of the field and adopts an independently minded position. Indeed, some observations and claims are made that should rightly be part of a wider debate in criminology, about the book's relevance, and its impact and contribution to the social sciences: legitimate and important questions that ought to be addressed. However, a few errors in the review need to be corrected and cannot go unchallenged.

'Rural', most crudely, is defined as 'non-urban', but this dichotomous delineation is grossly inadequate because it neglects the consideration of the nuances of geography, demography, attitudes, culture and issues of access both tangible and amorphous. These are vitally important considerations: there exists significant cultural and spatial separation between urban and rural because what is taken for granted in the city is not accessible or available outside of it.

There exists, most certainly, definitional difficulties about rural that will never go away. Should we just consider physical and demographic measures, such as population size and density, accessibility and remoteness? Such imprecision is typified by the existing definitions even within the same jurisdictions by different organizations and agencies of the same governmental units. Adopting a 'one size fits all' approach is unwise, though, as a universal measure will not account for the non-homogenous nature of geographic location, both within and across jurisdictions.

For instance, a coastal location in Australia dominated with former city dwellers cannot be easily compared to a rapidly populated boom town in Canada reliant on imported labour, to a primarily agricultural community in Ireland with multiple generations of the same families present, to the Yanomamo and Kayapo and other tribes in the rain forest regions of South America, nor to a remote settlement in the Siberian region of Russia or in the state of Alaska in the United States. Indeed, different places have different cultural origins - as scholars such as Hayden, Weisheit et al, Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy, Ceccato, Harkness (see suggested readings) and many other scholars already have observed. Hence, the rural can also be considered a state of mind as much as a particular place found on a map. There is just no way to define all the diversity of rural localities with a single word, sentence, paragraph and, perhaps, even in a single book.