By: Danna Jones
Michele Kwasniewski spent more than fifteen years working inside the entertainment industry before she sat down to write Rising Star, and every chapter of the novel reflects the specific quality of knowledge that direct professional experience produces in someone who has been paying close attention. She is not imagining what the music industry looks like from a fifteen-year-old girl’s perspective. She is building that perspective from the inside out, using the accumulated pattern recognition of someone who has been in rooms where careers are made and unmade, where talent is recognized and exploited and celebrated and consumed, and who has developed through that experience a precise and honest understanding of how the industry actually works at the level of human relationships and daily professional reality.
Dani Truehart at fifteen is talented, prepared, and navigating a world that is simultaneously the one she has been training for and considerably more complicated than any amount of training could have fully described. The guardianship arrangement with her vocal coach Martin, the recording contract with music producer Redman, the specific dynamics of a music career at the level she has just entered, all of these are rendered with the specificity of someone who has been there rather than imagined it. And underneath all of the industry material, Kwasniewski keeps Dani’s actual human life fully visible and fully weighted: the relationship with Sean that the career is steadily displacing, the family situation she has partly escaped and partly carried with her, the friendships that knew her before she was becoming a product.
The moral complexity of the characters surrounding Dani is one of the novel’s most important qualities. Martin is drawn with sustained ambiguity rather than resolved into trustworthiness or exploitation. Redman is specific and recognizable as a particular kind of industry figure rather than a generically dubious antagonist. The mother is overbearing and materialistic and also the person whose ambitions shaped a daughter who is genuinely talented, which means the situation is more complicated than simple escape would suggest. None of these figures are simple, because Kwasniewski has been around enough real versions of them to know that simple is the one thing they never actually are.
The first-person voice she constructs for Dani is calibrated precisely to a fifteen-year-old’s sensibility, neither simplified nor elevated, but exactly the intelligence and the gaps in experience and the specific emotional textures of a fifteen-year-old who is in the process of becoming someone who can read the world she has entered with the clarity she will eventually need. That authenticity of voice is what holds everything together and what makes the reader’s investment in Dani’s ongoing story feel genuinely earned rather than simply demanded.
If you want a YA novel about the music industry that earns its authenticity through fifteen-plus years of direct professional experience and builds at its center a protagonist who is one of the most fully realized young adult characters in recent fiction, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is exactly that book. Grab your copy on Amazon today and start the series.
