Catherine and her daughter run away from an abusive home one night. She reinvents herself as Cate and finds a job as a housekeeper for a reclusive fossil hunter Charles. But can she heal her daughter and her own heart?
The Way To The Sea is a gentle and warm book that deals with some big emotional issues.
Cate’s daughter Eliza is mute after witnessing her mother being abused. Cate has no choice but to abandon the family home and run away with Eliza. Her friend Allie helps her to find a job but she discovers that her new employer has his own heartache to deal with. His son died and his wife blamed him so left. Charles has been living alone with his guilt and grief but also the stress of his mother’s dementia. There is also a sub plot about Cate’s friend Allie and her worries about her son’s father coming back into their lives.
The emotional issues included in the book are pretty heavy but this is balanced by a lightness to the tone and style of writing. Cate, Eliza and Charles gently learn to connect with each other and begin to heal. I actually really liked the lack of sexual chemistry or any romantic development between Charles and Cate. Their respectful friendship felt very realistic.
I felt a huge connection with this book due to Matthew’s love of dinosaurs and our visit to Lyme Regis last year. There is plenty of detail about the different fossils that doesn’t bog down the story unnecessarily but has enough information for those of us with dino obsessed kids!
The Way To The Sea is a lovely heartwarming book.
The Way to the Sea
When Cate Rivers leaves her husband in the middle of the night with their young daughter, Eliza, she has no idea what the future holds. Taking a live-in position at Hollow House on the Dorset coast, she determines to make a new life for her and Eliza.
But Cate’s new boss, fossil hunter Charles Thorner, could do without the problems of a couple of runaways under his roof. He’s got enough worries of his own, including a painful past which still holds him prisoner today.
As the two of them learn to work alongside each other, secrets are shared and a new closeness is found, but they soon discover that you can only hide from the past for so long…
The Way to the Sea is the latest heartwarming novel by the bestselling author of The Beauty of Broken Things and The Rose Girls.
Victoria Connelly lives in a 500-year old thatched cottage in rural Suffolk with her artist husband, a springer spaniel and a flock of ex-battery hens. She is the million-selling author of two bestselling series, The Austen Addicts and The Book Lovers, as well as many other novels and novellas. Her first published novel, Flights of Angels, was made into a film in Germany. Victoria loves books, films, walking, historic buildings and animals. If she isn’t at her keyboard writing, she can usually be found in her garden either with a trowel in her hand or a hen on her lap.
