By: Mary Warden
Every now and then a YA novel arrives that gets everything right simultaneously: the premise, the protagonist, the setting, the emotional truth, and the willingness to hold complexity rather than resolving it prematurely for narrative convenience, and produces from that combination a reading experience that reminds you what the genre is genuinely capable of at its best. Rising Star is that kind of novel, and it earns its considerable pleasures honestly, through fifteen-plus years of direct entertainment industry experience and genuine literary craft and a protagonist written with the kind of psychological specificity that transforms a narrative about an industry into a story about a person who matters.
Michele Kwasniewski’s background in film and television production is the most significant structural advantage the novel has, and she uses it with complete intelligence. The music industry she depicts is not a glamorous backdrop for thriller mechanics or aspirational fantasy. It is an active force that shapes what is possible and what is at risk for Dani at every turn, and that creates the conditions in which her talent can flourish and also the conditions in which her interests and her sense of self are genuinely threatened. Kwasniewski understands this not as a thematic statement but as a structural reality, and she builds her entire novel around the specific ways that the industry’s logic intersects with Dani’s developing understanding of herself and what she wants.
The character work throughout the novel is another of its significant achievements. Kwasniewski takes the time to make every significant figure three-dimensional, giving each one a coherent inner life and a set of motivations that make their behavior comprehensible even when it is not admirable. Vocal coach Martin and music producer Redman are specific and morally complex in ways that reflect real industry figures rather than convenient fictional archetypes. Boyfriend Sean is given enough genuine presence and enough genuine connection with Dani to make the threat to their relationship feel like a real ongoing cost. The family dynamics are complex in ways that reflect how family situations actually are. All of this reflects the same commitment to honesty and specificity that makes the industry portrayal so valuable.
The first-person narration for Dani is calibrated precisely to her age and her situation, intelligent and perceptive and still in the process of developing the experience that would allow her to read every adult situation she finds herself inside with the clarity those situations require. Her growing awareness of the complexity of what she has entered is gradual and realistic, and the result is a protagonist who feels genuinely fifteen and who the reader genuinely cares about independently of the plot mechanics that surround her.
Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski opens a YA series built on firsthand entertainment industry knowledge, centered on a protagonist whose heart and her sense of self are both at stake from the very first page. Readers can find Rising Star on Amazon.
