I picked up The Best Christmas Choir Ever by Elizabeth Hrib because the premise sounded interesting and second chance romance is a favorite trope of mine. After reading it I have to say that the heavy layers of grief overshadow the romance, but I enjoyed the warm holiday feelings it evokes and the senior characters are the stars.

Charlie Ward has come back home to help her grandmother move into a retirement home. Her grandmother’s house holds many memories, both good and bad, the bad being the death of her brother, Tom, who had convalesced there before dying from cancer a scant two years before. She still grieves Tom’s death deeply but she can’t stay away forever. The Glendale Retirement Village is a lovely and welcoming place and Charlie can see right away that her grandmother will be very happy there. What she doesn’t expect is to find her teenaged summer fling, Julian Guerrero, is the current activities director at Glendale. And while Julian appears to have forgotten her, she definitely hasn’t forgotten him.

But Julian hasn’t forgotten about Charlie at all. In fact, she’d broken his heart when she’d ghosted him after going away to college. Like many in his life, his divorced parents, and his grandmother (who had died of dementia), Charlie was another of the people he’d loved who’d left him behind.

A constant struggle to get funding for the music program he’s trying to maintain means Julian is looking at all angles to get some money in, and when he sees that a local choir contest has a significant grand prize, the thought strikes to get his senior choir involved. And Charlie’s presence is perfectly timed as she’s a professional singer he knows could work wonders to get his choir up to the standards needed to compete. After hearing of Julian’s dilemma and not wanting to let her Gram down, Charlie somewhat reluctantly volunteers to be their choir director; she doesn’t plan to leave town for a while as she is helping to pack up Gram’s house for sale. In the two years since Tom’s death Charlie hasn’t wanted to do any professional singing as she’d always performed with him, and it doesn’t feel right to do things without him. Obviously this isn’t sustainable, and although Charlie knows she has to move on with her life sometime, she hasn’t been ready. Perhaps working in a volunteer capacity with the seniors choir will help her move forward.

As Julian and Charlie work together, old feelings are rekindled, which leads to some spicy scenes between them. But Charlie has no plans to stay in Glendale longer than necessary, and when the opportunity presents itself to get back on her feet professionally with a singing engagement at Lincoln Center, Charlie is torn. Should she follow the path Tom would have gone with her, or make a new one with Julian?

Tom’s name is mentioned 117 times in my ebook version of the story (yes, I looked it up) and he’s clearly an important character in the story, forming a significant part of Charlie’s life and informing many of her decisions, even though he’s dead. Even though the blurb mentions Tom, I didn’t think he’d be so front and center throughout the whole story. But he is key to Charlie’s actions and decisions so I understand why the author has made it so, even if it doesn’t make the story quite the lighthearted read I had hoped for. Tom’s room in Gram’s house is untouched since his death, so as Charlie is working through getting the house ready for sale she’s constantly reminded of him with pictures and the like. Plus, her whole singing career had been in tandem with her brother so doing any sort of singing without him feels to her as though she’s forgetting about him, so she struggles with grief and guilt.

Julian and Charlie’s second chance romance is a believable one though (and Julian eventually confesses why he pretended not to remember her and to the truth of his feelings when she’d left him behind). Charlie, for her part, hadn’t realized that when she’d moved away and gotten distracted with other life events that Julian hadn’t moved on in the same way. Still, had they stayed together at that age they probably wouldn’t have lasted long as a couple, as they weren’t in the same place emotionally. As mature adults this time around, they can make better choices and also come into the relationship understanding that it’s a day by day thing.

Some of the best scenes feature the seniors, Gram among them. If you’ve seen the show A Man on the Inside, about an older spy in a care home, you’ll appreciate the humour and how the characters relate to each other and to the reality of aging, and there are lots of laughs to counter Charlie’s grief. The contest preparation and result, as well as Charlie’s choices and how it all works out to give Charlie and Julian a happy ending is satisfying. I’d recommend this holiday romance with reservations so readers go in understanding that grieving a cancer death is still front and center in the story.