By: Jason Anderson
There are books about the entertainment industry and there are books that understand the entertainment industry from the inside, and the difference between them is immediately perceptible to anyone who has spent time in that world. Michele Kwasniewski is a proud member of the Producers Guild of America who worked on films including Independence Day, Face/Off, Primal Fear, and Evita before moving to television production management on shows including Big Brother. When she writes about the music industry in Rising Star, she is drawing on more than fifteen years of accumulated knowledge about how entertainment actually operates at the level of actual human relationships and daily professional dynamics, and that knowledge gives the novel a texture that is simply not available to writers working from the outside.
The story she tells with that knowledge is a careful, specific, and emotionally honest account of fifteen-year-old Dani Truehart’s entry into the professional music world. Dani is talented, trained, and not entirely sure that the career she has been prepared for is the one she would have chosen if anyone had given her the chance to choose freely. That uncertainty, the gap between the ambition she has been trained to have and the self she is still in the process of discovering, is the quiet engine of the novel, and Kwasniewski keeps it alive throughout without resolving it prematurely in either direction.
The decision to accept her vocal/dance coach Martin’s guardianship offer is both liberating and complicated in ways that Kwasniewski renders with the patience of someone who understands that real situations rarely resolve into simple moral categories. Martin has invested three years in Dani’s development and has genuine investment in her talent, but the guardianship arrangement he proposes serves his interests in ways that Dani cannot yet fully perceive, and Kwasniewski keeps the moral ambiguity of his position alive throughout the novel. Redman, the producer who offers Dani her contract after a single audition, is similarly drawn with the specificity of someone who has worked alongside many versions of him, successful and dubious in proportions that genuinely coexist rather than simply alternating.
What makes the book genuinely valuable for its audience is the way it keeps Dani’s authentic adolescent experience at its center even as the adult world of the music industry increasingly surrounds and presses on that experience. Her relationship with her boyfriend Sean is treated with the seriousness it deserves, as the part of her life most entirely her own. Her friendships and her bond with her sister remind you throughout that Dani is a complete person navigating a complicated situation, not simply a career in progress. Her self-critical inner voice after performances and her genuine joy when her talent is working are both rendered with the psychological accuracy that reflects genuine attention to how fifteen-year-olds actually experience the world.
Rising Star is a debut novel that announces a writer ready to do serious work in YA fiction, with the insider knowledge to make the world she is depicting feel real and the emotional intelligence to make the person navigating it feel genuinely worth caring about across an entire series.
If you have been looking for a YA series that brings genuine entertainment industry experience to a story about a young woman finding her own voice inside a world designed to use it, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the first book you need to read. Pick up your copy on Amazon today and meet Dani Truehart at the beginning of a journey that will keep you reading through every book that follows.
