By: Cameron Trepp
The most respectful thing a YA novelist can do for their audience is refuse to simplify the things that are actually complicated, and Michele Kwasniewski refuses with considerable skill throughout Rising Star. The entertainment industry she depicts is not a dream or a nightmare but something considerably more honest, a world in which genuine talent and genuine exploitation and genuine opportunity and genuine risk all exist in the same professional relationships, and in which a fifteen‑year‑old navigating it for the first time has to develop in real time the specific literacy required to read what is actually happening around her. That refusal to simplify is what most clearly marks the book as a novel that respects its audience.
Dani Truehart is that fifteen‑year‑old, and Kwasniewski has written her with the kind of psychological specificity that reflects genuine attention to how adolescents actually experience the world. Her doubts about her vocal and dance coach Martin’s sincerity do not resolve into simple distrust or simple faith. Her ambivalence about the career she has been trained for does not resolve into rejection or wholehearted embrace. Her relationship with Sean does not end or not end based on the demands of narrative convenience but continues to exist in the complicated in‑between space where real relationships tend to live under pressure from external circumstances. All of this reflects Kwasniewski’s commitment to honoring the complexity of her subject and her protagonist, and it is what makes the book genuinely worth reading rather than simply entertaining.
Her fifteen‑plus years in film and television production give her the industry knowledge to render the music world with authentic specificity, and the Producers Guild membership signals a level of professional engagement with entertainment that goes beyond casual familiarity. When she writes about how the industry operates, she is writing about something she knows from direct experience, and that knowledge gives every scene in which Dani navigates professional relationships a credibility that purely imagined entertainment worlds cannot match. Martin and Redman are specific and morally ambiguous in ways that reflect real industry figures rather than fictional archetypes. The contract Dani signs is complicated in ways that reflect how such contracts actually function rather than how they are typically portrayed in fiction for simplicity’s sake.
What the novel does with all of this is ultimately about Dani, about the specific experience of a fifteen‑year‑old developing her understanding of the world she has entered and the people who have interests in the talent she brings to it. Her growing awareness is gradual and realistic, her self‑critical inner voice after performances is calibrated precisely to her age and her specific situation, and her genuine joy in her own talent when it is working is given the same space and specificity as her doubts and her fears.
Rising Star is a debut novel that announces a writer ready to do serious work in YA fiction, and the series it launches is one worth following through all of its promised complications.
Readers looking for young adult fiction that treats its audience as intelligent enough to handle fame, identity, and the distance between other people’s dreams and their own will find that territory covered here with care. The novel is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook editions, including Rising Star on Amazon.
