By: Robert Andrade
There is a particular kind of YA fiction that takes its protagonist’s youth seriously without condescending to it, that understands adolescence as a state of genuine complexity rather than a simplified version of adult experience waiting to be completed, and Rising Star belongs firmly in that category. Michele Kwasniewski writes Dani Truehart not as a young person who has things to learn about the world but as a fully realized individual navigating specific and genuinely difficult circumstances with the specific capabilities and the specific limitations of a fifteen-year-old who has spent most of her life training for a career she was not entirely sure she chose. That distinction is a significant one, and Kwasniewski maintains it throughout the novel with the consistency that reflects a writer who genuinely understands her protagonist rather than simply using her.
That distinction, between training toward something and choosing it, is the philosophical center of the novel, and Kwasniewski builds Dani’s story around it with considerable skill. The mother who has shaped Dani’s ambitions is not presented as simply wrong. The career that ambition has produced is not presented as simply right. The industry that Dani enters through her vocal coach Martin’s guardianship and music producer Redman’s recording contract is not presented as either a dream fulfilled or a trap sprung. It is presented as what it is, a complicated world of genuine opportunity and genuine risk managed by adults whose interests in Dani’s talent are real but not identical to Dani’s interests in her own life. Kwasniewski renders that complexity with the patience of someone who has spent fifteen years watching it operate in real professional contexts and who understands that simplifying it would be the least honest and the least useful thing she could do for her young adult audience.
Her background as a film set assistant on major Hollywood productions and as a production coordinator/manager on television shows including Big Brother gives her the industry knowledge to make that complexity specific rather than abstract. The way professional relationships actually function in entertainment, the specific dynamics of power and talent and commercial interest, the coexistence of genuine opportunity and dubious arrangement in the same contract, all of this is rendered with the kind of detail that can only come from direct experience rather than from research, and that specificity is what gives the novel its particular authority.
The emotional beats of the book, Dani’s relationship with her boyfriend her complicated feelings about her father, her bonds with friends and her sister, her self-critical inner voice after performances, her genuine joy in her own talent when it is working and her genuine doubt when it is not, are all handled with the care of a writer who understands that these relationships are not secondary to the main plot but the actual substance of the main character’s life. The career is the pressure being applied to Dani’s life from the outside. The relationships are Dani’s life itself, and Kwasniewski never lets the reader forget which of those two things is ultimately more important.
Rising Star is a debut novel that announces a writer with something real to say and the experience and the craft to say it, and it makes a genuinely compelling case for the series it launches.
If you want YA fiction that treats its protagonist’s inner life with the seriousness it deserves and that builds its entertainment industry world from genuine experience rather than borrowed detail, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is exactly the book you need. Head over to Amazon and get your copy today and let Dani Truehart’s story remind you of everything that is at stake when someone else’s dream becomes part of your own.
