Reshonda Tate Billingsley has become one of my favorite authors. She came with it once again in Seeking Sarah. She introduced us to Brooke a young woman in a relationship, a daddy's girl and going places with her career. A huge family secret sends Brooke on a search for what she has been missing for some time.

The author kept me reading until the end. I wanted to know what would become of Brooke. At times I wanted to pull Brooke to the side and have a good friend talk with her about some of her actions. I definitely recommend this book to others looking for a good read.

I really enjoyed this story. Will definitely recommend it to others

This book was the strangest book ever. At first I thought it was so twisted that I didn't like it but as the book went on, things began to make more sense. I still didn't love the main character, but I understood why she was the way she was. I didn't personally love the story, but I did think it was a very well thought out plot. It wasn't one that I've seen before. Nothing so far out there that it is unbelievable.

Unfortunately, I did not care for this book. I had trouble getting into the story and the characters weren't that interesting to me. The writing was ok, and the story moved along at a good pace. While the plot appealed to me, there was too much drama. If you like drama-filled, dark, family secrets and ruined lives, then this might be the book for you. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Seeking Sarah was a wonderful story. This book was so vivid and close to real life that I wasn't sure I'd be able to get through it, but I'm so glad I did. My heart literally ached for this poor precious girl. She had experienced so much pain in her young life. Ms. Billingsly definitely has a talent for sharing the emotions of a character and the feeling our atmosphere within a group.

Brooke Green doesn’t believe in forever love. She believes that the people you love almost always leave.
So when her boyfriend, Trent surprises her with a marriage proposal. Brooke is tongue-tied. But as they are in a room full of people, she knows she has to say something. She finally manages to say yes but all the while her mind is spinning with questions and doubts.

All she can think about is the two loves she’d lost. She swore she’d never do this again.
She has good reason to feel nervous with everything that happened in her past.

“One fatal bullet altered the course of my life”

When Brooke’s father suddenly passes away, Brooke is devastated. On his death-bed he apologized to Brooke but wasn’t able to say what he was apologizing for. She hears her grandmother reassure her father that see saying “I will tell her”. Brooke has no idea what to expect and what her grandmother tells her shocks her to her core.

Her mother passed away when she was seven years old. Well that’s what she was told. But her grandmother tells her that her mother is actually alive, that she walked out on Brooke and her father all those years ago. Her father thought it would be easier for Brooke to mourn her mother’s death than to feel abandoned.
Throughout the book are flashbacks to times Brooke remembers when her mother was still around.
When she sees the life her mother is living now, Brooke is livid. Now she’s not sure what she wants. Part of her wants to see if there is a chance for a relationship but another part of her just wants revenge. Plus she needs to decide how she feels about the future, with Trent or without.

This book examines the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. Can anything ever replace a mother’s love?

This was completely different from what I was expecting. The characters were a complicated bunch. I felt for Brooke and all that she had been through but some of her decisions were a little over the top. There was a lot going on. The story-line was interesting but there was a lot of drama and at times it was a bit predictable. In the end, I thought it was a decent read with a good message about the power of love and forgiveness.

Thank you Netgalley and Gallery Books for providing an advanced readers copy of this book for me to read in exchange for my honest review.

I received this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I'm not sure how I feel about this book. It started out ok, but then it went into complete soap opera drama. Brooke was a character I struggled with. I could sympathize with her need to find her Mom and find the truth. She just went off the rails. It was a quick, confusing and just too much for me kind of read.

The writing was pretty good for the most part. There were times I wanted to start reading something else but I wanted to find out how it would end.

The bond between a mother and daughter is complex. It can be nonexistent or the best friendship ever. Brooke Green has lived with the pain of losing her mother since she was seven years old. Her father did the best he could raising her but couldn't possibly fill that void. Funerals bring out family secrets and Brooke's father's funeral was no exception. Brooke received shocking news: her mother, Sarah, was actually alive.

Brooke doesn't understand how a mother could just abandon her family so she starts searching for Sarah. She finds her living in Atlanta with a brand new family. In an effort to get answers, Brooke works her way into their family for revenge.

What a doozy of a novel! Very well done and page-turning. It is twisted and full of drama. I cannot imagine how a mother could abandon her child, no matter how complicated life may seem. But the author does a good job of conveying emotions of the characters. I dropped my jaw on a couple occasions while reading. Go ahead and add Seeking Sarah to your TBR piles; it is well worth the read.

Happy Belated Pub Day, ReShonda Tate Billingsley. Seeking Sarah is now available.

LiteraryMarie

What a wonderful day it is. Brooke Hayes becomes engaged to to the most wonderful man. He's not only a Sergeant in the Navy, but he's gorgeous too! Brook Hayes feels like she has the world in her hands. What could possibly go wrong? Imagine thinking that your mother passed away when you were a little girl. You grow up with your father, who showered you with much love. However, your father continues to grieve for his wife, until the day that he dies. Brooke has flashbacks of interactions with her mother, when she was a small child. She also has flashbacks of her father and mother arguing constantly about her mother wanting to leave. Brooke gets a call that her father is in the hospital, and he's very ill. But on his death bed, he says to daughter he is sorry. She doesn't know why he would say that. She asks her grandmother what he meant by saying, "I am so sorry." Her grandmother finally shares the secret that's been kept from her for decades. What does it have to do with her mother? What's this secret? Why did her father keep it from her? How will this secret affect her relationship with her Fiance and her upcoming marriage? How can one second change a person's entire lifetime? So many questions. Brooke decides to pursue answers to these questions. I enjoyed the overall plot, but feel that the character development could have been done in more detail. I became confused with some of the characters in the book because of this. Moral of the story is that revenge and vindication are not always what we expect them to be!

Sometimes a book is hard to read. It is hard to digest. It is hard to not to take it personally and think objectively. And, then it is hard to write a review. That is how I feel about Seeking Sarah. I'd read a few pages and then would need to take a break. Read a few more pages and then take another break. This book could have easily been read in one sitting, but it took a few days because of that.

I rolled my eyes and angrily wiped the tears from my face. "There is nothing for you to say. Complicated or not, you don't abandon your kid. End of story." I gritted my teeth. "You have no idea what you've done to me."

Folks will learn one way or the other the damage they create when they decide to abandon their child. I'm not saying what is done in this book is right, but I understand. Seeking Sarah will have you feeling some type of way and make you wonder about your own morals because you understand Brooke and her actions. Family ties, rejection, and revenge are the perfect ingredients for an interesting and emotional plot. ReShonda Tate Billingsley proves once again why she is so well-respected within the literary community and why so many readers love her. Well done, ReShonda!

I was a little board with this book, it just didn't keep my interest. I read about halfway through.

A woman discovers that her “dead” mother actually abandoned her and the rest of the family years earlier and goes to find her. The questions that plague her, however, also cause her to neglect the other relationships in her life, and she comes to a life-altering moment that may make her lose everything. Author ReShonda Tate Billingsley tries to shape a compelling novel but instead misses the mark by a cavernous margin in the juvenile plot of Seeking Sarah.

Brooke Hayes knows what it’s like to lose someone she loves. The love of her life died in an accident, and her mother died when she was 7 years old. She even lost her dog a year ago. Her father and grandmother do all they can to help her, even this many years later, but Brooke still feels the emptiness left especially by her mother’s death.

When Brooke’s father goes into the hospital and then dies unexpectedly, Brooke doesn’t think she can hold herself together. How much more loss, she wonders, will she have to sustain? The question becomes irrelevant for her, though, when her grandmother reveals the most stunning news of all: Brooke’s mother, Sarah, didn’t die. She simply left the family.

As she tries to grapple with the fact, the new man in her life, Trent, announces he’s re-enlisting in the Navy. At one time Brooke thought she could see herself sharing a future with Trent, which included a civilian life and no more tours in the military. Now everything she knows for sure has spiraled out of control.

She decides that before she can explore a future with Trent, she has to find her mother and get the answers to questions that have left her longing for maternal affection. Brooke hires a private investigator who tracks her mother down in Atlanta, just hours away from Brooke’s home in Raleigh, NC. More shocking than the proximity is the news that Sarah remarried and has other children.

Incensed that the woman who gave birth to her has been so close for so many years and apparently living a happy life with a new family, Brooke drives straight to Atlanta to confront Sarah. There she meets Sarah’s children and then her new husband, and before Brooke knows it she finds herself in the most compromising situation of all. She has the power to destroy her mother’s life to get revenge; all she needs to decide is whether she’s going to go through with her plan.

Author ReShonda Tate Billingsley gets everything possible wrong with this story that an author can. Her main character, Brooke, evokes absolutely no sympathy whatsoever. Because the story is told in first person, readers get to know Brooke in the most intimate of ways. Her justifications to herself for her actions only weaken her argument. She sounds more like she’s trying convince herself that because her mother hurt her, she has carte blanche to do anything her whims might dictate for revenge. She does get that revenge, but it’s in the most immature way possible and only brings about more sorrow for everyone involved.

By the end of the book, readers will most likely wonder why they waited around for some possible redemption. Despite numerous opportunities for it, Billingsley never steps in and allows Brooke a gracious way out of a difficult situation. At one point, Brooke makes the observation that she’s in her mid-30s; her characterization makes her sound like a whiny teenager.

The other characters, too, lack any traits to make readers like them. Trent, Brooke’s love interest, comes across as self-centered and pig-headed. Brooke’s father doesn’t get a chance to offer any explanation whatsoever for why he and Sarah split, which makes him look almost unnecessary to the story. Sarah’s new husband will repel readers with his “creepiness” from their first interaction with him, and her stepson seems more disturbed than Brooke herself.

Most disappointing is Sarah. Billingsley doesn’t give her titular character a concrete reason for leaving Brooke. Readers will have a bevy of guesses before reading the book for why Sarah might have left. All of those guesses will be wrong. In truth, Sarah herself never manages to answer Brooke’s question of “Why” even though Brooke confronts her on numerous occasions. The best Sarah can manage is a shrug and a mumbled apology.

I recommend readers Bypass Seeking Sarah.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

The basic plot of this story is that a young woman, Brooke Hayes, who has just accepted Trent Grant's proposal to marry, learns after her father dies that her mother is not dead. It was her father's deathbed wish that her grandmother tell her that they had been lying to her all these years. Her mother is alive, and as Brooke discovers, is happily married to some other guy and raising a family with him. Rather than seek rapprochement, Brooke seeks revenge, and decides to seduce her mother's husband.

This idea appealed to me as a novel, but I have to report that the execution of it was a fail. I made it about one third the way through this, and that was as far as I could stand to read, because the writing really turned me off the story. The rest of it I skimmed and skipped, and it did not improve.

I had problems with a lack of realism in the story, but mostly the problem was that the main character came off as being a few legs short of a bucket of friend chicken. I used that description advisedly, because there was only one meal depicted in the portion I read, and it was fried chicken! I was thinking, come on, a black family and the one meal you show them eating together is fried chicken? Way to culturally stereotype! If a white writer had written that, they would have been accused of stereotyping if not racism. I know people do eat fried chicken, and some more than others, but would it really have hurt the story to have depicted a different meal? Are writers really so afraid these days of coloring outside the lines? How I wish they were not.

This was a minor problem though compared with others I encountered. The relationship between Trent and Brooke did not strike me as a charmed one, nor as a loving one, and the foreshadowing of the outcome was far too heavy-handed leaving only one surprise: why were these two people even together in the first place? Most of the time they were depicted in this story, they didn't even seem like they had ever dated before!

They had zero in common and no hope for a future. Trent wanted to live his own life and go his own way. He didn't seem to care what Brooke wanted, which begs the question as to why he constantly lied that he was there for her and why Brooke was too dumb to see through the lie. He never was there for her, and he came off more like a pain in the ass brother than ever he did a decent fiancé.

There was this obnoxious dominating quality emanating from him, and he seemed completely out of tune with Brooke. I know this was addressed later, because I skimmed later portions of the story and the ending wasn't one I thought was very good.

In one example of how far apart they were, they were in a restaurant, and Trent got a call. He said, "This is my commander. I've been waiting on this call. Excuse me a minute." So he gets up and leaves her at the table why? Is the call super-secret? This is his fiancée he's sitting with and he's discussing something which affects her, and which she's already aware of; no truly caring partner would have got up to hold a call like that in private.

It made it look more like this was a call from a secret lover than a career call. I know this happens all the time on TV and in the moves - everyone who ever gets a call walks away to talk on the phone, and I think this author just ran with that cookie-cutter piece of writing without expending a single thought on how this would go down in the real world.

If there was something tied to this - like it wasn't his boss but a woman he was having an affair with, that would have at least made some sense. Brooke never even gets suspicious of this behavior. Once again she's portrayed as not having much going on behind a pretty face, Trent is portrayed as callous, and the story sounds like it was written from cue cards rather than form the heart.

The author either doesn't think much of healthcare professionals or she's had little experience of them outside of TV and movies. I read:

Then the nurse frantically rushed us out as I heard someone else yell, "Code Blue!"
Several nurses and the doctor came racing down the hall. They shuttled us out of the room as it turned into a whirlwind of chaos.

Anyone who hasn't been around when a code is called can be forgiven for viewing it this way I suppose, but it's not what happens. Yes, there is urgency of course, but 'whirlwind of chaos' isn't a nice way to describe medical professionals trying to save someone's life. Once a code is called (and it's not by someone yelling "Code Blue!") there are certain people who hurry to the patient, and each has a specific job to do. You can't dismiss it as 'several nurses and one doctor' unless you want to look like an amateur working on bad fan fiction.

The problem with this section isn't that, though, it's that the author describes the people being taken out of the room twice - like the first time they didn't leave? The nurse frantically rushed them out? No, the nurse isn't frantic, she's an expert at what she does. She will ask you to leave and be urgent and firm about it because the professionals need the room to work, but she isn't frantic.

The issue here though is, if the nurse rushed them out, then why do several nurses and a doctor have to shuttle them out immediately afterwards? In point of fact there is likely to be more than one doctor and only the nurses who are required to help out. There will also be a respiratory therapist, and someone (the ward clerk most likely) will probably call a chaplain or someone like that to be with the family.

At the fried chicken dinner, Trent's father selfishly takes the chicken breast every single time and the hell with his kids, and Brooke is so stupid that she thinks this is an ideal family! No wonder Trent has serious issues. At one point his thoughts are: "He didn't want to drag her back. He feared that she'd just leave again" WTF?

Trent honestly thinks he has the right to manhandle Brooke against her will and literally drag her off somewhere? What is he, a caveman? I suspect even a caveman would have had issues trying to drag "his woman" back to his cave if she didn't want to go. I don't see how we can celebrate the end of slavery when some authors quite evidently still see women as the property of Neanderthal men. This book is copyright 2017, but reads like it was published in 1720

This novel came with nine screens (on my phone) of advertising related to other material from this same author, and offering glowing reviews from people I don't know, and whose opinion I have no reason whatsoever to respect. This tells me the publisher thinks I'm as stupid as Brooke is, in that I will be swayed just because a stranger gushes over something. No. The answer is no. One such screen was one too many.

When I request a review copy it's because I've already decided the novel might be worth a look. You don't need to go the whole nine screens to sell it to me. No amount of mindless sound bites form strangers is going to change my mind one way or another because no one else's opinion matters. The only thing that matters is the writing and I am sorry, truly sorry, that the publisher thought that was not enough in this case even though in the end, the publisher was right.

So: published in 2017, and the author still doesn't think it's worth giving a nod to recycling? "...walked back in the kitchen to put the paper towel in the trash". Yep. You know, novels, even this one, will be read by people (evidently impressionable people too!), and just one passing brief mention of recycling might make a difference, but not for this author. Or is she trying to 'spread the word' that African Americans simply don't recycle? Because I don't buy that, and I think it's insulting to suggest otherwise. Any one of these things would be a minor thing not worth a mention, but when the reader is hit repeatedly with one thing after another like this, then it's certainly worth taking issue with it.

We learn that one character "leaned back, crossing her long, sultry legs" Sultry legs? It was this kind of thing cropping up repeatedly: sloppy writing, thoughtless plotting, careless attitude towards creating a novel, that rapidly turned me off reading any further. I got the impression from it, that the author really didn't care about this novel, and perhaps even had the same attitude towards it that Sarah had towards her relationship with her daughter Brooke: little or no interest in it and couldn't be bothered to make the effort, so she left it and walked away.

She hobbles Brooke with what amounts to a worship of her grandmother, cringing like someone might take a switch to her if she disses her 'superior', when this woman has been outright lying to Brooke for years about her mother's fate. Then the hypocritical grandmother has the gall to turn around at one point and "She shot daggers my way. 'Are you calling me a liar?'" Yeah granny. You are a liar and you don't deserve respect, and I felt the same way about this novel. I cannot in good faith recommend it.

*I received this arc from Netgalley for an honest review.*

ReShonda Billingsley definitely kept me guessing with this one. I could have never predicted the outcome of this, as I so easily have with some other books I've read. I'm still in the process of letting the book sink in since it left me in a bit of a shock. It was incredibly well written and I'll definitely look for books from ReShonda in the future.

With a cast of unlikeable characters and a storyline that is unbelievable, this was a book I really didn't care for. Would someone ruin a bright future by seeking revenge for something that had happened in their past? Would they change their whole outlook in order to hurt someone else. Maybe, but I found this book to be sad and depressing watching the lengths someone would go to to destroy the life of someone else.

In Seeking Sarah, Brooke Green has been told since the age of seven that her mother is dead. While on his deathbed, her father keeps apologizing. once the dust settles, Brooke finds out from her Grandmother that her mother is in fact alive. Brooke hires a private detective and is able to find her mother. What happens next is a lot of intense drama.

I truly felt sorry for Brooke for the lies she was told, and what she does once she finds her mother. I couldn't relate to the character because I have a pretty good relationship with my mother, but I could feel her pain throughout the story. I enjoyed the story very much and thanks to Netgalley for the read.

There's a LOT of drama here. Not just secrets and lies but DRAMA with a capital D. I had a hard time finding someone to like in this novel of secrets, lies, and let's face it, revenge. Not Trent, not Tony, not Sarah, and frankly, not even Brooke. That said, it was a fast and highly entertaining read- I had a hard time turning away even as I totally disapproved of pretty much everything these people were doing to each other. Gosh! Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Recommend this if you like fast paced novels where you'll find yourself shaking your head at the characters and saying to yourself "oh no you don't".

Brooke discovers that her family wasn't what it seemed after the death of her father. She also finds that the mother she though was dead was very much not dead! Not only was Brooke's mother alive but she was only a few hours away living the dream. 
ReShonda takes us on what looks to be a journey of reuniting a mother daughter combo. But this trip isn't what it seems. Seeking Sarah was a dark tale of two women living different lives and how their lies and abuse turns into a journey of self destruction. 
I highly recommend this twisted dark tale of self discovery and self destruction. The book is FULL to the brim with drama you will have minor anxiety attacks as you are reading!