Rating: 4 🌈🌈🌈🌈

I adore this author and eagerly grab up each new offering as she releases it. Doesn’t matter what trope or character type, I’ll know that the author’s engaging style, her well layered characters and terrific plot will have me deeply entertained and throughly meshed with whatever universe and romance she’s created.
So it was with real interest that I saw a chance to read Albert’s very first story and series. I wanted to see what her first book and couple looks like and how much I could learn about the beginnings of a author I admire.
Here we have the story of a tv singing competition, a cobbled-together singing group and the two wildly different young men in it who go on to romance and hopefully a HEA . One flamboyant, desperately competitive and definitely out gay. The other quiet, from a conservative religious family that accepts he’s homosexual but only within a strict set of guidelines. And away from home for the first time.
That’s the barest story framework. Then Albert works a lovely sort of magic.
All the elements I expect from Annabeth Albert now in her series I can see here. Not fully . Not yet but the rough, lovely start of the complex, flawed people who we will meet in all the stories and series to come.
The messy personal dynamics? Check. The personal growth and self revelation? Check. Here the epiphany and hard choices seem to arrive and resolve themselves too quickly for all the history that both the men have and the sea changes each has to undergo.
But it’s her first book. So yes I get it. All that is a new author, one who’s works will , one after another, settle, show growth themselves, a strength and depth that here glimmers as promise.
Is this still a very sweet and lovely story to read. Absolutely. A must is the list of songs from the author at the end. Don’t miss them or any of the videos she listed. They enrich the story and will make you smile.
So a definite yes. I’m recommending it and will finish the series.
I need to know how it ends. So will you
Perfect Harmony series;
Treble Maker
Love Me Tenor
All Note Long
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6477494.Annabeth_Albert