By: Nicholas Stone
The entertainment industry has been generating YA fiction for decades, and most of it falls into one of two predictable categories: the cautionary tale that positions fame as inherently corrupting or the aspirational fantasy that presents it as straightforwardly achievable through sufficient talent and determination. Michele Kwasniewski has written neither of those books. Rising Star occupies the considerably more uncomfortable and considerably more honest territory between them, drawing on her own fifteen-plus years working inside film and television production to build a portrait of the music industry that is neither demonized nor romanticized but simply rendered with the specific, complicated texture of something she actually knows from the inside.
Dani Truehart is fifteen, talented, and beginning to understand that the career she has been trained for might be both genuinely hers and genuinely not entirely hers in ways that are difficult to disentangle. The mother who shaped her ambitions is overbearing and materialistic enough that escaping her orbit feels like relief, but the orbit she escapes into, vocal coach Martin’s guardianship and Redman’s production deal, is not uncomplicated. Kwasniewski is careful not to make the reader’s moral assessment of these situations easier than Dani’s own assessment is, and that refusal to simplify is one of the book’s most valuable qualities for its YA audience, many of whom are navigating their own relationships with authority figures whose interests do not perfectly align with their own.
The romance with Sean is handled with a particular delicacy that reflects the author’s understanding of what genuine teenage relationships actually feel like under pressure. It is not simply a subplot inserted to demonstrate that Dani has a personal life outside of the industry. It is the part of Dani’s life most entirely her own, the thing the career is asking her to sacrifice by increments, and Kwasniewski keeps that sacrifice visible throughout in ways that make it genuinely feel like a loss rather than a narrative convenience. Sean is given enough interiority and enough authentic connection with Dani to make his position in the story feel genuinely important, and the threat the career poses to their relationship carries real emotional weight because Kwasniewski has made the relationship real first.
The book’s prose has the directness and the emotional clarity of someone writing from genuine feeling rather than constructed effect. Kwasniewski does not over-write Dani’s inner life, does not inflate the emotional stakes beyond what the situation warrants, does not reach for drama when authenticity will do more. The result is a first-person voice that feels genuinely fifteen, that registers Dani’s world with the specific sensitivities and the specific limitations of a fifteen-year-old who is intelligent and perceptive and still in the process of developing the experience that would allow her to read every situation she finds herself inside with the clarity the situation requires.
Kwasniewski has written a novel that earns its credentials through insider knowledge and emotional honesty rather than through dramatic plot mechanics, and the series it launches promises to repay the investment its opening volume asks of the reader.
If you have been looking for a YA novel that treats the entertainment industry with the honesty and the specificity it deserves and that builds at its center a protagonist you will genuinely invest in, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the book that does both. Pick up your copy on Amazon today and step into the world that Kwasniewski spent fifteen years learning, and Dani Truehart is only beginning to understand.
