In this paper, we present an efficient route recovery approach for ad hoc networks, which modifies an existing ad hoc routing protocol (AODV) to enhance the recovery capability and reduce the recovery overhead. Under the proposed approach, each node on an active route (each active node) maintains a backup node. Once an active node moves (fails) to result in link breakages in its route, the broken active route can be locally repaired by moving the backup node of the moving (faulty) active only. Unlike previous approaches, the proposed approach does not incur the route discovery overhead. To achieve high recovery capability, the proposed approach also considers the backup node mobility. The backup node mobility is usually ignored on the previous approaches. Finally, we performed extensive simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over previous approaches in the recovery capability, overhead, and route length.