By: Roxanne Jeffrey
There is a difference between knowing how an industry works from the outside and knowing it from the inside, and that difference shows up in fiction in ways that are immediately legible to anyone who has been in the room. Michele Kwasniewski has been in the room, many times, in many different capacities, as a film set assistant on major Hollywood productions including Independence Day, Face/Off, and Evita, and as a production manager on television shows including Big Brother that required her to understand not just the technical logistics of entertainment but the human dynamics that make those logistics either function or collapse. When she writes about the music industry in Rising Star, the details feel borrowed from memory rather than from research, and that quality of recall is what gives the novel its particular and valuable authenticity.
Dani Truehart is fifteen, talented, and living a version of her life that has been substantially shaped by her mother’s ambitions rather than her own. The decision to accept her coach Martin’s guardianship offer is both an escape and a leap into an unknown that is at least partly of her own choosing, and Kwasniewski handles the ambiguity of that leap with a precision that reflects genuine understanding of how young people actually navigate the gap between the lives they have been given and the lives they are beginning to suspect they might want. Dani is not naive, exactly, but she is still in the process of learning to read the adults around her with the skepticism that the industry she is entering demands, and the gap between what she perceives and what the reader gradually begins to understand is one of the novel’s most effectively deployed sources of tension.
The producer Redman is drawn with the specificity of someone who has worked alongside many versions of him, successful and dubious in proportions that are genuinely difficult to separate at first encounter. He hears Dani’s first performance and his amazement is real, his recognition of her talent is real, and the offer he makes is real and also not entirely what it appears to be in ways that Dani is only beginning to understand. Martin’s sincerity is a sustained question rather than an answered one, a position that requires genuine novelistic skill to maintain across a full-length novel without becoming either a sustained false alarm or a premature revelation. Kwasniewski maintains it successfully, and the result is a mentor figure who is more interesting and more useful for a YA audience than either a simple trustworthy adult or a simple predator would have been.
What makes Rising Star work as a novel, rather than simply as an authentic portrayal of an industry, is Kwasniewski’s insistence on keeping Dani fully human throughout. The career is never more important than the girl pursuing it, and that priority is what makes this book genuinely valuable for its YA audience. Her relationship with her boyfriend Sean, her complicated family dynamics, the friends who knew her before the career arrived and who are becoming harder to reach as the career makes increasing demands, all of these are given the same care and the same specificity that the industry material receives, and the result is a novel in which the entertainment world illuminates Dani rather than overwhelming her.
Kwasniewski has written a debut 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.
The novel offers a portrait of the music industry from someone who worked inside it, and it is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook editions through Rising Star on Amazon.
