By: Andrew Vespa
Most YA novels about fame treat the desire for it as a given, a fixed star that the protagonist navigates toward across the full length of the story, with the drama arising from the obstacles that appear between the wanting and the getting. Michele Kwasniewski is more interested in the more honest and more complicated version of the story, in which the desire itself is not entirely the protagonist’s own and the pursuit of it involves a continuous and largely unarticulated negotiation between what Dani has been trained to want and what she might discover she actually wants if anyone gave her space and enough information to find out. That negotiation is the quiet engine of Rising Star, and it is what elevates the book above the considerable pleasure of its industry authenticity and its engaging plot mechanics.
Dani at fifteen is talented beyond question. Three years of voice and dance training with Martin have prepared her for exactly the kind of audition she lands and exactly the kind of contract that music producer Redman offers. What her training has not prepared her for is the experience of navigating an adult world of professional relationships and power dynamics and commercial interests that are not always aligned with her own wellbeing, while simultaneously managing the ordinary emotional complexity of being fifteen, with a boyfriend whose life is moving in a different direction and friends who knew her before and a family situation that is part of what she is running away from and part of what she is afraid to leave behind.
Kwasniewski renders all of this with the kind of detailed, patient attention that comes from having spent fifteen years watching how entertainment actually functions and what it does to the people who get caught up in it. Her industry experience shows not just in the accuracy of the details but in the moral texture of the world she builds, the way that dubious arrangements and genuine opportunities coexist in the same contract, the way that people who profit from Dani’s talent are not simply villains but something more complicated and therefore more dangerous, the way that the industry’s appetite for Dani’s gift is genuine and also not particularly concerned with what that appetite might cost the person the gift lives inside.
The supporting characters are built with the same care and moral complexity. Martin occupies a position of genuine ambiguity throughout, invested in Dani’s success in ways that serve his own interests without necessarily serving hers in identical measure. Redman is drawn as the kind of industry figure who is successful because he is genuinely good at identifying and developing talent and successful in ways that have required him to make a certain kind of peace with arrangements that do not always prioritize the performer’s wellbeing above the commercial product. These are not cartoon figures. They are recognizable human beings operating inside a system that rewards certain behaviors and punishes others, and Kwasniewski renders them with the honesty of someone who has worked alongside many versions of them.
The emotional life of the novel is as carefully handled as its industry portrayal. Dani’s relationship with her boyfriend Sean is treated with the seriousness it deserves, as the part of her life most entirely her own, the thing the career is steadily asking her to sacrifice not through any single dramatic demand but through the accumulated weight of scheduling conflicts and absences and the gradual reorientation of her attention toward professional relationships that have no room for the ordinary textures of a fifteen-year-old’s romantic life.
If you want to read a YA novel that is genuinely honest about the cost of pursuing fame and genuinely compassionate about the young people who find themselves caught between their own dreams and someone else’s, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the book that delivers both. Grab your copy on Amazon and discover the series that begins with one of the most emotionally authentic YA debut novels in recent memory.
