This audiobook was right up my alley
I love Harper Bliss’s books, they have all the ingredients that I enjoy reading in romance: superb chemistry, sweet romance, the right amount of drama, and hot sex. Add to that combination a group of endearing characters from other books, a vibrant music setting and a great narrator, and this audiobook was a perfect match for me.
The Lady Kings and their singer, Lana Lynch, are coming back on a tour after ten years of absence from the stage due to the sudden death of Lana’s wife and guitarist. For their comeback tour, they choose a young but famous band called The Other Women. Lana invites the lead singer Cleo Palmer to sing a duet with her for every night’s show encore. What follows is an incredible on-stage chemistry that slowly trickles off-stage. But Lana and Cleo are very different in many aspects and band politics threaten to get in the way of a potential romantic connection…
This is a fantastic characters’ chemistry study. Leave it to Ms. Bliss to put two very different women on a stage singing a duet together, and make their chemistry explosive. Lana and Cleo couldn’t be more different in age (Harper Bliss’s specialty), personality, and life experience, but as it normally happens in this author’s books, opposites attract fiercely. The way the attraction is written, from their first meeting to the end, is absolutely fantastic.
In the background of the romance, there is the interesting setting of two bands on a tour. Mix a few queer people sharing the stage, backstage and road trips, and you have the perfect recipe for drama. Ms. Bliss describes this situation very well and it introduces an almost infinite source of conflict. The politics and disputes behind each band were as engaging as the romance.
There are a few cameo appearances of characters from other books by Harper Bliss, my favourites, Izzy and Leila from A Breathless Place. If you’ve read that book (which I highly recommend) or listened to the audiobook narrated by Abby Craden, you’ll be happy to catch up with the lives of these characters.
The audiobook version was narrated by the fantastic Abby Craden who did as usual an amazing job. I know that a great part of my overall enjoyment of this audiobook was her performance of the different range of emotions, the distinctive voices of each character, and the nuances of the narrative tone throughout the book. Harper Bliss was very smart to choose Abby Craden’s narration as her performance style is perfect for Ms. Bliss’s work. 4.5 stars.
Length: 6 hours, 5 minutes
