By: Jilian Defoe
Fame, as most people imagine it and as the entertainment industry sells it, looks like a destination reached through sufficient talent and sufficient effort, a place where the hard work of preparation finally meets the right moment and everything opens up into the life that was always meant to be. Michele Kwasniewski’s more than fifteen years working inside the entertainment industry have given her a considerably more complicated and considerably more honest picture of what that process actually involves, and she brings that picture to Rising Star with the care of a writer who wants her YA audience to understand the world Dani Truehart is entering in all of its specific complexity, not to frighten them away from ambition but to give them the clearest possible picture of what ambition actually encounters when it meets the industry organized to receive it.
The audition that changes Dani’s life is both the culmination of years of genuine preparation and the beginning of a set of arrangements she does not fully understand.Music producer Redman’s amazement at her talent is real and his offer of a contract is real and the dubious elements of both the man and the deal are also real, coexisting with the opportunity in ways that a fifteen-year-old with Dani’s experience and Dani’s training has not yet fully developed the tools to navigate. Her vocal coach Martin’s guardianship offer is an escape from her mother’s controlling orbit and also a new set of dependencies and obligations, and Kwasniewski renders both of those things simultaneously rather than resolving the ambiguity in either direction.
What makes the book genuinely valuable for its audience is the way it keeps Dani’s authentic adolescent experience at its center even as the adult world of the music industry increasingly surrounds and presses on that experience. Her relationship with Sean, her friendships, her complicated feelings about her family, her doubts about her own talent even when her performances are clearly succeeding, all of these remain vivid and specific throughout, giving the novel an emotional grounding that prevents the industry material from overwhelming the human story at its heart. Sean is given enough genuine connection with Dani and enough interiority of his own to make the threat the career poses to their relationship feel like a real ongoing cost rather than a theoretical sacrifice.
The first-person voice Kwasniewski constructs for Dani is one of the novel’s most impressive accomplishments. She sounds fifteen, not younger and not older, with the specific intelligence and the specific gaps in experience that the situation demands. Her growing awareness of the complexity of the arrangements she has entered is gradual and realistic rather than sudden and dramatic, which is both more honest and more useful for young readers navigating their own developing understandings of adult power and institutional interest.
Kwasniewski has written a debut that earns the reader’s investment in Dani’s ongoing journey and makes the next book in the series feel genuinely necessary rather than simply desirable.
If you want to read the beginning of a YA series built on genuine entertainment industry experience and centered on a protagonist you will root for through all of the complications that fame brings in its wake, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the place to start. Pick up your copy on Amazon today.
