By: Armin Koester
One of the most truthful things about Rising Star is the way Michele Kwasniewski handles the gap between achievement and satisfaction, the specific experience of arriving at a destination you have been moving toward for years and discovering that the territory it occupies is more complicated than the map suggested. Dani Truehart has spent years training for the career that is now opening up in front of her, and the moment it actually arrives, in the form of her vocal coach Martin’s guardianship and music producer Redman’s contract and the sudden reality of Hollywood’s music scene, is the moment she begins to understand that what she has been preparing for and what she actually wants may not be entirely the same thing.
Kwasniewski renders that understanding with the patience of a writer who knows it is not the kind of thing that resolves in a single moment of clarity or announces itself in a single moment of disillusionment. Dani does not conclude that fame is bad or that her mother was wrong or that Martin’s intentions are entirely dubious. She begins to suspect that the situation is more complicated than any of those conclusions would allow, and she starts to develop the specific, incremental awareness that survival in this industry requires. That developmental process is rendered authentically rather than accelerated for narrative convenience, and the result is a protagonist who feels genuinely fifteen rather than precociously adult, who is growing in her understanding of the world around her through the accumulated experience of navigating situations that are not quite aligned with her own interests.
The industry knowledge that Kwasniewski brings to the novel from her fifteen-plus years in film and television production is present throughout, but it is always in service of character rather than demonstration of expertise. The details feel observed rather than researched, and that quality of lived observation is what gives the book its authority and its authenticity. She knows how these arrangements actually work because she has been in rooms where they were made, and that knowledge infuses every interaction Dani has with the adult world of the music industry with a specificity that readers can feel even if they cannot immediately name its source.
The emotional life of the novel is given the same weight as the industry detail. Dani’s relationship with Sean is the thread the reader follows most anxiously, because it represents the part of her life most entirely her own, the thing the career is working to displace not through any single dramatic demand but through the accumulated weight of changed priorities and scheduling conflicts and the gradual reorientation of her attention and energy. Her family situation, her friendships, her bond with her sister, all of these give her a context that the career is working to replace, and Kwasniewski keeps the value of that context visible and the cost of replacing it genuinely felt.
If you want a YA novel that is genuinely honest about the distance between achievement and fulfillment and that builds that honesty into a story about a fifteen-year-old girl navigating her first real encounters with professional ambition and adult power, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the book that does it best. Pick up your copy on Amazon today.
