Narrated by Megan Tusing
Charley Layton is an up-and-coming DJ at a major Nashville radio station. On her birthday, she goes out with some colleagues to a bar and there meets the Rising Star of the book’s title, Dylan Monroe.
Dylan has recently signed with Shooting Star records. He’s their first artist and so there’s a lot of pressure on him to succeed. He had a record deal once before but the album tanked and he was cut loose by his prior label. Now is his second chance and he’s got to make the most of it because he doesn’t think there will be a third.
Charley moved to Nashville from Kentucky and has big plans of her own to have a career in radio. Her mother had her own career plans derailed by a man and Charley has no intentions of following in her footsteps. She plans to steer clear of relationships and focus on her career. But it would be okay to have a fling on her birthday. That’s not a commitment or anything. (Oh, Charley, Charley, Charley. That never works. Have you never read a romance novel??)
Dylan is a genuinely nice guy. Good looking, talented and just vulnerable enough to be adorable without being pathetic or needy. He’s not arrogant or even terribly alpha. In fact, he’s the kind of hero who’s been recently dubbed a “cinnamon roll”.
At first, Charley is reluctant to get involved with Dylan. He’s persistent but not in a creepy “I’m not-listening-to-you” way. He just asks her to give him a chance and she agrees – to one date. And then another. And another. And then she gives in to her own desires and agrees to date him.
Dylan’s career is just about to take off and his manager, Mitch, thinks marketing Dylan as an eligible bachelor will be better for his sales so Charley and Dylan agree to keep their romance out of the public eye for a few months. It’s all done with Charley knowing what’s what, no hiding or secrets between the lovebirds.
The conflict wasn’t where I expected it to be. I won’t say exactly what happens because these developments are later in the story and I think it would be too spoilery but the problems between the pair do involve machinations by Mitch when Dylan is away on a concert tour.
There are also some other story threads being developed about the Shooting Stars record label which I believe will be explored as the series progresses even though Rising Star is a stand-alone romance complete with HEA. The threads aren’t terribly intrusive but at the same time I can’t say they were a great fit within the story either.
I enjoyed the narration by Megan Tusing very much. She had a great range of character voices and excellent Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana accents for the cast. She was able to put some husky into her voice for Ruby, the veteran Nashville DJ Charley works with and some extra twang for an older and fictional-but-super-famous musician Dylan and Charley meet along the way. Ms. Tusing’s hero voice was well done too.
Ms. Tusing also delivered on the emotion of the book and conveyed the romance of the pair as well as their chemistry in the intimate scenes.
My main complaint about the story (apart from the predictability of the evil-Manager manipulates the hero trope) is that much is made at the start of Charley’s ambitions. Dylan supports them 100% and at the end of the story, his career is definitely well-settled and celebrated. But what about Charley? There wasn’t very much about her career at all at the end of the book and I really wanted to know how that was working out.
And that brings me to the one part of the narration which was perhaps a little less-than-good; Ms. Tusing didn’t quite manage to sell me on the assurance in the text that Charley was an amazing DJ. The parts of the dialogue where Charley was doing her thing didn’t scream “amazing DJ”. They were more “school assembly notices”. However, those bits didn’t take up much of the book so it didn’t have a major effect on my grade.
Something I was 50-50 on was when Dylan was “singing” in the story, Ms. Tusing spoke the lines. That’s a tough one. Some narrators sing (although it’s hard to do when the tune is unknown, that didn’t stop Davina Porter in Outlander for example) and some do a kind of “speaking on pitch” (think Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady) and others – as here – just say the words, a little like poetry. Again, it’s not a huge part of the story and, I much prefer hearing the words spoken if singing is not the narrator’s forte – so I counted it neither as a plus or a minus.
I certainly enjoyed the narration enough to look out for more of Ms. Tusing’s work. And I plan to listen to more Terri Osburn books too.
Kaetrin
Buy Rising Star by Terri Osburn on Amazon
