By: BR Masterson
The premise of Rising Star is one of those setups that sounds simple until you follow its implications all the way through, and Michele Kwasniewski has followed them all the way through with the patience and the intelligence of a writer who understands that the most interesting stories are the ones that refuse to make things easier than they actually are. Fifteen-year-old Dani Truehart has spent her childhood training for a career as a pop star, not because she chose it with the full clarity of someone who has examined her own desires and found them pointing in that direction, but because her mother wanted it, and the training happened, and here she is, talented and prepared and not entirely sure whose dream she is actually living. That uncertainty, quiet and persistent and not entirely formed enough to be called a decision, is the emotional center of the novel, and Kwasniewski handles it with the patience and the specificity of a writer who genuinely cares about what it costs a person to live inside someone else’s vision of their future.
What happens when Dani accepts Martin’s offer to become her guardian, stepping away from her mother’s orbit into the orbit of a former boy band member with his own complicated relationship to the industry, is both a practical change of circumstances and a psychological turning point. She is not suddenly free. She is differently constrained, in an arrangement that she does not fully understand with a man whose sincerity she is not entirely sure she trusts, working toward a career with a producer whose dubious edges she is only beginning to learn to see. Kwasniewski renders all of this with a realistic texture that reflects her more than fifteen years working inside film and television production, and that texture is what keeps the story from ever feeling like a cautionary tale in disguise. This is not a book that has a simple lesson it is trying to deliver. It is a book that is genuinely interested in the complexity of Dani’s situation and willing to let that complexity remain complex throughout.
The supporting characters give the novel its emotional depth and its social texture. Dani’s relationship with her boyfriend Sean, threatened by the demands of a career that leaves less room for ordinary life with every chapter, is rendered with the kind of specificity that makes you feel the loss before it has fully arrived. Her friends and her sister give her a context that the music industry is steadily working to replace, a world that knew her before she was becoming a product and that she is increasingly unable to fully inhabit. Her father, who she wishes would stand up to her mother, is a quietly painful presence throughout, the adult who has the capacity to intervene in her situation and consistently declines to use it. None of these relationships are simple, and none of them are treated as secondary to the industry plot. They are the actual substance of Dani’s life, the thing the career is asking her to give up by increments, and Kwasniewski makes sure you feel the value of what is being asked before it is fully surrendered.
Martin’s sincerity is a sustained question throughout rather than an answered one, which is one of the novel’s most skillfully handled elements. He has invested three years in training Dani and has a genuine investment in her talent, but the guardianship arrangement he proposes serves his interests in ways that Dani cannot yet fully perceive, and Kwasniewski keeps the moral ambiguity of his position alive without resolving it in either direction. Redman is similarly drawn with the complexity of an actual industry figure rather than a convenient fictional antagonist, successful and dubious in proportions that coexist in ways that make the straightforward warning impossible and the straightforward celebration equally so.
If you want a YA novel that treats its protagonist’s inner life with the seriousness it deserves and that gives the music industry the authentic texture that only someone who has been inside entertainment can provide, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is exactly the book you are looking for. Pick up your copy on Amazon today and start the series that readers who love smart, emotionally honest YA fiction have been waiting for.
