By: Andreus Usha
The difference between fiction that uses an industry as atmosphere and fiction that understands an industry as a character in its own right is the difference between decoration and substance, and Rising Star is firmly in the second category. Michele Kwasniewski spent more than fifteen years inside film and television production, developing the specific professional knowledge that allows her to render the music industry not as a glamorous backdrop for Dani Truehart’s story but as an active force that shapes what is possible and what is at risk for her protagonist at every turn of the narrative. The industry is not something Dani moves through. It is something that acts on her, that shapes her options and her relationships and her understanding of herself, and Kwasniewski keeps that agency of the industry visible throughout.
The contract music producer Redman offers after Dani’s first audition is genuinely exciting and genuinely complicated in proportions that feel accurate to how these arrangements actually work in real entertainment contexts. The guardianship her vocal/dance coach Martin proposes is an escape from one set of controlling arrangements into another that has its own dynamics and its own risks, dynamics and risks that Dani cannot fully perceive at the moment she accepts the arrangement. The way the industry’s demands steadily encroach on Dani’s ordinary relationships, her connection with her boyfriend Sean, her friendships, her sense of herself as a person rather than a career in progress, is rendered with the accumulating pressure of something Kwasniewski has watched happen in real professional contexts rather than invented for narrative effect.
Dani at fifteen is navigating all of this with the tools she has available, which include genuine talent and considerable training and not yet enough experience with how power actually operates in entertainment contexts to read every situation clearly. Her self-critical thoughts after her performances, her doubts about Martin’s sincerity, her awareness that something about Redman is not quite as straightforward as the opportunity he represents, are all signs of intelligence in the process of developing the specific calibration that survival in this industry requires. Kwasniewski keeps that developmental process realistic rather than accelerated, 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 by increments rather than arriving at clarity all at once.
The emotional life of the novel is given the same attention as the industry portrayal. 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 scheduling conflicts and changed priorities and the gradual reorientation of Dani’s attention and energy toward professional relationships that have no room for the ordinary rhythms of teenage romance.
The novel’s prose is controlled and precise, never overreaching for dramatic effect when the authenticity of the situation will do more effective work. Kwasniewski trusts her material and trusts her audience, and both of those qualities show in every chapter.
If you want a YA novel that treats the entertainment industry as the complex moral and professional environment it actually is and builds at its center a protagonist navigating it with genuine fifteen-year-old intelligence and genuine fifteen-year-old limitations, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the book that does both. Pick it up on Amazon today and start the series.
