In Bottle Imp's review of the year's books from Scotland, Gillian Beattie Smith says:

Cracknell's book experimentally combines essay, reflection, travelogue and memoir. She walks in her own childhood as well as in the footsteps of others, where she makes 'peace with the contradictory impulses of familiarity and "otherness"' and confronts the unreliability of memory. That gothic internal strangeness in her writing has struck me in much of her work and has at times unsettled my students. And yet, there is a wonderful humour in her reflections; it is the honest, personal integrity in her writing that I find engaging, and the unfamiliar treatment of the familiar which is haunting. I am delighted that Doubling Back has been declared an outstanding success in New Nature Writing by such weighties in the genre as Robert Macfarlane. I fully agree.