By: EM Crocker
There is a specific quality of authenticity that separates fiction written by someone who has been inside the world they are describing from fiction that has been researched from the outside, and it announces itself on nearly every page of Rising Star. Michele Kwasniewski spent more than fifteen years in film and television production, working as a set assistant on films like Independence Day, Face/Off, Primal Fear, and Evita and as a production coordinator/manager on television shows including Big Brother, before she sat down to write the story of fifteen-year-old Dani Truehart’s entry into the Hollywood music scene. That background is not incidental to the novel’s quality. It is the source of everything that makes it feel genuinely real rather than approximately accurate, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a book you read and a book you believe.
Dani Truehart has spent most of her childhood training for a pop star career that her mother wants considerably more urgently than Dani herself has ever been allowed to examine. When she accepts her voice and dance coach Martin’s offer to become her guardian, an escape from her overbearing and materialistic mother as much as a professional arrangement, she is thrust into a world that is simultaneously everything she has been working toward and considerably more complicated than any amount of preparation could have fully described. The producer Redman who offers her a contract after her first audition is amazed by her talent and somewhat dubious in ways that Dani is only beginning to learn to read. The relationship with her boyfriend Sean is threatened by the demands of a career that leaves less and less room for the ordinary textures of a fifteen-year-old’s life. And underneath all of it, the question that Kwasniewski is too honest a novelist to answer quickly: is this career actually Dani’s, or has she been shaped toward it so thoroughly by other people’s desires that she cannot yet tell the difference?
What Kwasniewski does with that premise is considerably more nuanced than the setup might initially suggest. She is genuinely interested in the interior experience of a young girl navigating the gap between the ambition she has been trained to have and the self she is still in the process of discovering, and she renders that gap with a specificity and a compassion that reflects both her own industry experience and a genuine understanding of adolescence. Dani’s self-critical thoughts after her performances, her doubts about Martin’s sincerity, her complicated relationship with a father who does not stand up to her mother, her fear that the career she has always wanted will cost her the boyfriend she has chosen for herself rather than had chosen for her, all of these are handled with the kind of careful attention that turns a coming of age story into something that actually matters to the reader long after the plot details have faded.
The music industry details feel lived-in rather than borrowed, which is exactly what you would expect from someone who has spent fifteen years watching how entertainment actually operates from the inside. The highs and lows Kwasniewski describes, the joyous performances alongside the dubious arrangements and the power imbalances and the casual cruelties of an industry organized around exploitable talent, are the highs and lows that people who have been there recognize immediately. That recognition is one of the book’s most valuable gifts to its young adult audience, many of whom are navigating their own versions of the pressure to perform for someone else’s vision of their future.
The supporting cast is built with genuine care and specificity. Dani’s friends and sister give her a world that existed before the career arrived and that the career is steadily working to replace. Her father is a quietly painful presence, the adult who could intervene and does not. Martin and Redman are rendered with the moral complexity of real industry figures rather than the convenience of fictional archetypes. And Sean, the boyfriend, is given enough interiority and enough genuine connection with Dani to make the threat to their relationship feel like a real loss rather than a narrative convenience.
If you have ever felt the pull of a dream that was partly yours and partly someone else’s and wanted a story that understands exactly what that feels like from the inside, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the book that gets it right. Grab your copy on Amazon today and meet Dani Truehart, one of the most authentic young protagonists in recent YA fiction.
