I must confess The Summer seekers by Sarah Morgan is the first book from the author that I have read. This is a warm, funny emotional read that I really enjoyed and will be seeking out the rest of her back catalogue.
Kathleen is 80 years old and lives in a beautiful cottage in Cornwall. She is very independent for her age but one night she come across an intruder in her home and batters him with a skillet pan. Her daughter Liza is the serious one and is always worrying about her. And after this incident wants to put her in a home. They have also never had the close mother daughter relationship that other people had had.
But Kathleen has other ideas, she wants to travel to America and do the Route 66. When Kathleen was younger, she had her own Tv show The Summer seekers which she travelled all over the world. So, she advertises for someone to drive her. And then she meets Martha, and they go on the trip as planned and meet other people along the way.
While her mother is away her daughter Liza is having a midlife crisis decides to stay at the cottage while she is away. Finding things about her mother that she never knew about.
I thank you HQ and NetGalley for this book. I loved this emotional story about three different women, each on a different life affirming journey and what they did to change it for the better. This is beautifully written and thought-provoking story even made me have a little tear in my eye afterwards. 5 stars from me.

What a beautiful story, I thoroughly enjoyed it & hope to read some more by Sarah Morgan. Wonderfuly written, I felt right there alongside the characters, as they ravelled along Route 66

I adored this beautiful story which was told through the perspectives of three very different women. Kathleen's decision to drive across America at the age of eighty changes the lives of each woman different ways. Kathleen has held a secret close to her chest for sixty years; even her daughter Liza knows very little about her mothers past. Spending time with the chatty Martha encourages her to start opening up and hopefully try to build a closer relationship with Liza.

Martha is unhappy with the way her life is going and takes the job of driving Kathleen across America purely as a way to escape her life for a while. Spending time with the older woman gives her perspective however, and gives her the confidence boost she so desperately needs.

While Liza is at breaking point, feeling as if her family take advantage of her and needs to take time out just for herself. She wants to feel like herself, and not just a wife and mother.

Quite often when I'm reading a book with alternating perspectives I become impatient when it switches as I want to get back to a particular setting or perspective. I didn't feel like this at all with this book and found myself equally looking forward to each perspective whether it was with Martha and Kathleen on Route 66 or in Cornwall with Liza. I was invested in the lives of all three women as they started to reflect on their lives and think about the things they wanted to change.

Sarah Morgan’s books never fail to be anything other than wonderful and this one is no different. I was captivated from the first page and didn’t want to put it down.
This is the fabulous story of 3 woman.
Kathleen who is in her 80s and in her hey day used to present a holiday program called the summer seekers and has decided to have one last hurrah and travel in a open top car along Route 66 much to the disapproval of daughter -
Liza - who is worried about the state of her marriage and is fed up being under appreciated by her family, especially her teenage daughters. Trying to please everyone had come at great cost to Liza who never thinks of herself.
Desperate to be close to her mother with whom she has never had a great relationship with Liza upsticks after reaching breaking point and goes to her mothers cottage by the sea whilst she is away. Is she about to discover her mothers long time secrets and will it bring them closer together.
Martha - fed up of living at home after her short lived marriage and with no great career prospects. Martha is constantly reminded of her failings and compaired to her perfect sister by an over bearing mother.
When she sees a job advert to be the travelling companion to Kathleen, driving across America she thinks why not and applies and so begins a great adventure ..
I was completely entranced by all 3 woman’s stories which changed from chapter to chapter.
A brilliant book that I will definitely be recommending to friends and fellow book lovers.

What a lovely book. A story about relationships and dreams. Very believable and warm characters with problems we can all relate to. An ideal summer escapist novel. Did not want it to end.
Thank you to NetGalley and HQ for the advance copy of this book.

A great book that makes you want to travel! Just want you need after being stuck inside for the last year!

I've read and enjoyed a few of Sarah Morgan's books so I was delighted to receive an early preview copy from Netgalley and the Publishers.
Like many of Sarah Morgan's books there are dysfunctional and fractured family relationships. In this book Mother and Daughter Kathleen and Liza do not have a good relationship.
They lead different lives and don't see eye to eye. A shocking incident makes Kathleen to follow a lifelong dream to travel the Route 66, and reassess her relationships. She employs Martha, a stranger to drive her across America's Route 66.
I really liked Martha and it was nice to see her character grow in confidence. I would have liked to know what happened next, after the road trip. I could relate to Liza, and how family life and demands can seem never ending at times.
I found this book easy to read, it was well written and the story flows well, despite moving between the three female characters. I enjoyed the interactions between the characters, and how the relationships changed throughout the book.
Some of the storyline was a little predictable, but the events leading up to them were not as I expected. There were also times when I thought I had guessed what was going to happen, but I was wrong. There are lots of twists and turns.
I really enjoyed reading this book, there were plenty of heartwarming moments, great locations, both Route 66 and Cornwall. A little romance along the way too. This is the perfect summer escapism.

Another fabulous book from Sarah Morgan. Following the lives of 3 women this book takes us on a journey from Cornwall to Route 66 in America. Kathleen an older widow with a desire to do Route 66 hires Martha to drive her, a divorced young lady who hates driving but wants to escape her life so applies for the job. Kathleen's daughter is left behind but has her own issues to sort so Liza goes and stays in Kathleen's house in Cornwall to find herself and sort her marriage out but the character has several twists and turns along the way. . Lovely and emotional with an easy to follow story although it does jump around the 3 main leads. Thanks Sarah Morgan her publisher and NetGalley.

You know your in for a good book when you see Sarah Morgan on the cover and this book does not disappoint. Route 66 across the USA. Memories and friendship haunt the trip. Relationships fracture and mend, running away from situations but they resolve in various ways down the route. Enjoy I did.

I have been a fan of Sarah Morgan’s books for many years now, so naturally I requested The Summer Seekers when it appeared on NetGalley.

This is a tale of three women who have lost their way a little, and how they find it again. Kathleen is 80 and fears she is going to lose her independence, Liza (her daughter) has submerged herself in becoming the perfect mother and wife, and Martha is recovering from an unfortunate marriage and critical family.

I loved this book. I loved the way that Kathleen and Martha’s personalities interacted. I loved the character development of all three women. I loved the summery atmosphere. I loved the gentle humour. I love the fact that the characters are women of different ages.

Reading a Sarah Morgan book is like receiving a warm hug, and this one is no exception. The story reminds you that broken or worn down things can be fixed.

If you’re looking for a wonderful, heartwarming summer story, look no further. This one carries my strongest recommendation.

I was given a free copy of this book, my opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this book. I loved all of the characters, the locations and the story line. Sarah Morgan is so good at bringing her characters to life and, although there is a little romance, it’s primarily about family relationships.

It really is the perfect summer read and I highly recommend it!

Liza is a worrywort! That’s an underestimate, she busy being a wife to Sean and a Mum to her demanding teenage twins.
Her aging Mum is also causing her great concern.
She’s too busy in life’s treadmill to enjoy herself and work out what she wants from life.

Her Mum on the other hand is a free spirit and a brush with reality makes her realise that she still wants to experience more from life.

I really enjoyed this book and was glad it wasn’t predictable. Glad that there was no predictable encounter with the too cool for school Pop star neighbour Finn.

I’m really pleased that I was able to provide this review in exchange for a free arc provided by Netgalley.

Sarah Morgan is my Mum's favourite author, so I though we could read this one together (or separately but at the same time). She had said that she hadn't liked her more recent books as much, so I was intrigued by this one too which the broad plot survey didn't suggest was a straight up romance. In fact from the plot survey I couldn't help but feel this was a remarkably cynical exercise: an older woman takes a roadtrip across America with a depressed twenty-something out of a terrible relationship - whilst her daughter feels trapped with a family and kids not feeling loved. If you wanted to triangular three core demographics of romance readers, you couldn't do better than these three characters. And yet, as I said, it is not primarily a romance.

Morgan does a good job at inhabiting these characters, who despite being relaitvely stock she gives a fair bit of nuance too quite quickly. She is good on the kinds of barriers families put up internally, and good on romantic disappointment. There is however a little bit of a sense that when Morgan is writing about them they are suddenly possessed with ideas and behaviours which are different to the norm. This is particularly true of the older woman, who has been emotionally shut off from her daughter to the degree that it would seem impossible to change - the scenario in the book allows that to happen but how much of the change is natural, and how much is Morgan "writing her that way" was an issue I grappled with (and in talking so did my Mum - who is the same age as that character). But this isn't too deep, despite some big life lessons along the way, this is a bit of fantasy wish fulfilment for everyone involved. Cocktails in Chicago, route 66 in a convertible. Even the daughter trapped in the UK gets to flirt with rock star (the rock stars retreat in Cornwall being one of the more cliched items here - not least when you consider generationally he probably had to be in Blur or Oasis).

When I was a kid on holiday we would inevitably run out of books and read each others. I have a health respect for the burn through and dispose of narratives of a Mills & Boon - whilst accepting how retrograde those paperback in the 80's were. There is romance in here, the twenty-something gets an equally damaged man to pal about with - but this is much more women's relationship fiction and despite my sense that much of the set-up and play off is cynically pandering, its good pandering. You want a happy ending, you want reconciliation and you want this sipping a margarita on a beach, wherever that beach would be. And I asked my Mum what she would give it out of five, and she said a return to form and...

[Netgalley ARC]

I absolutely loved this book from beginning to end. Wonderful characters and the relationship between mother and daughter was so well portrayed. I could not put the book down and did not want it to end.

When I see Sarah Morgan, my first thought is Christmas stories, because she writes such amazingly memorable ones. I know there are others, but that is the genre that sticks in my mind.
Having said that, seeing The Summer Seekers blurb whet my appetite for another cracker of a story.
It seems to be a common theme in recent books I have read, for the story to be set around a road trip, this was the third in as many weeks that I read.
Kathleen is an eighty-year-old woman, living alone, fiercely independent, but afraid of what impending age will do to her life.
Liza, Kathleen's daughter wants only the best for her mother. She spent her childhood watching her whirlwind of a mother, taking off to all sorts of glamorous locations as the host of a famous travel show, with little time for her, She has spent her adulthood determined to be more like the mother she wished she had, there, always, for her twin girls and husband, Sean, but that life begins to take its toll.
A chance encounter featuring an intruder, a skillet, the police and a head injury, fires up the urge for Kathleen to take one last trip of a lifetime. She's always wanted to travel Route 66, but, rather like the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, there is something important she knows she might find at the end of the trip, only she's not so sure if she wants to find it.
However, driving over two thousand miles alone at eighty is probably not a good idea, and there is no way she wants to take this trip with her daughter.
Cue Martha, a mid-twenties woman with nothing to lose. An incomplete education, failed marriage and family disapproval behind her, the intrigue of an advert, requiring someone to drive, on an all-expenses-paid trip, spurs her on to take a step in a direction she has never considered before.
A wonderful premise for a story filled with so much, from realisation, to love, new beginnings to happy endings; it's all there and written in a way that has you falling in love with all the characters, and the places they visit, too.
Many thanks to NetGalley and HQ for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Oh I loved this book, such a lovely feeling throughout!

Kathleen is 80 and lives on her own in a beautiful house in Cornwall. She's always been very independent and an adventurous world traveller so is finding it hard that she's more restricted now due to age. Her daughter, Liza, is always worrying about her and trying to persuade her to sell and go into assisted living accommodation for her own good, which Kathleen is having none of. Then, after a run-in with an intruder, Kathleen decides that life's too short and as she doesn't want to end up in a home and always wanted to travel Route 66 that's what she's going to do, hiring someone to drive and be her companion (25 year old Martha), much to the consternation of her daughter.

Kathleen has always kept a tight control of her emotions and been a bit distant with her daughter but during the road trip we found out why. Kathleen starts to open up to Martha about her earlier life and emotions, and Martha starts to find her confidence which has been battered down by her critical family. We also have the delightful Josh, who the ladies pick up along their Route 66 adventure, who isn't quite what he seems either.

Back home Liza is pushed too far by her family who treat her like a doormat, even though she lets them, so she takes herself off to the Cornwall house and rediscovers her love of painting and just having a bit of time to herself. And here we also meet Kathleen's next door neighbour, rock star Finn. He was only a side character but I'd love to hear more about him, hopefully in another book!

So we have a couple of stories linked together but with everyone working through family issues and coming out the other side a lot stronger and happier.

A delightful book!

This was a really well written book that takes the reader into its arms and transports them across the pages. Kathleen escapes her Daughter's over protectiveness to take a madcap trip along Route 66 accompanied by a young woman , afraid of driving. Her daughter Liza escapes the result of her desire to control everything in her life by abandoning husband and twin daughters to fend for themselves whilst she lives in her mum's cottage.

It is a beautiful novel about achieving dreams, about balancing life and creating a family life that works. Additionally the author chucks in a couple of handsome young men in the form of hitchhiker or neighbour to foment the mix

A take you away from it all success story.

Great story! Loved the way this unfolded and the dynamic between the two women The characters really resonated with me and I finished reading with a huge smile on my face - well worth a read!

I really enjoyed this book and have begun to really look forward to reading her work!
I thought this book was a good reminder to us all about how we should really love the life we have been given and to embrace each day... especially resonated with Liza and how easy it is for motherhood to consume you!

I’m a huge fan of novels featuring cross-generational friendship and this was a great example, with the added bonus of great US road trip and scenery thrown in. I really enjoyed this and recommend it. Thanks NetGalley!