A Dream Within A Dream: Fallen Star Blog Tour: Review + Giveaway

http://www.booknerdtours.com/2013/fallen-star-by-jim-cangany-blog-tour.html

Welcome to my stop on the official blog tour for Fallen Star! Today I have my review of the book to share with you and don't forget to enter the giveaway at the bottom of the post! To follow the rest of the tour, click on the banner above.

Fallen Star (North Star Trilogy #1)

Author: Jim Cangany

Genre: Contemporary/Romance

Release Date: June 14, 2013

Description:

When ordinary guy, E.J. McCarty, crosses paths with not-so-ordinary Annie Wilson, extraordinary things happen. For E.J., it’s the start of a great adventure. For Annie, it’s an escape from colossal failure. But thanks to fate--and Amtrak--they’re thrust together on the cross-country ride of their lives.

E.J. and Annie like each other, so what’s the problem? Rock star/actress Cassandra Lawrence is the problem. Despite their obvious attraction to each other, Cassandra’s history in show biz and distrustful nature conspire to keep them apart.

Can E.J. break down the walls Cassandra has built around Annie? Can Annie learn to trust E.J. enough to let him even try? And what’s with E.J.’s bizarre dreams about the North Star? From Chicago, through the heartland and all the way to the Malibu Pier, they struggle to accept that while faith, hope and love are important, trust is the key to the future.

Fallen Star is the first book in a contemporary romance trilogy that follows main characters E.J. McCarty and Annie Wilson as their lives are thrown together during a train ride across the country. The characters of E.J. and Annie are realistic - they both have strengths and weaknesses - that make them easy to identify with throughout the book. I enjoyed watching their characters get to know each other and to see how their relationship would grow in the book. The setting is a perfect one for this type of book - what is the best way to get two characters who might never have met in other circumstances together? Put them somewhere where there's no escape - like a cross country train ride. It's not a completely original idea, but I did enjoy the descriptions of the scenery and the way the characters acted with one another. There's the obvious and a bit cliched issue of one of the characters have issues with trust or having walls put up to protect themselves from getting hurt - it seems to be a recurring theme with romances like this - and I did get a bit bored with it at times. The author included more to the story than just the romance factor - it deals with issues like trust, failure, hope, love, faith, and family - among other things. I felt that these deeper topics gave the book a more layered story line and made it more interesting for me as a reader. Overall, this is a good contemporary romance with heart that fans of the genre will enjoy reading.