By: Lucia Wilson
The title of Rising Star refers to Dani Truehart’s emerging pop music career, but it also refers to something that matters considerably more to the quality of the novel and to its value for its YA audience: Dani’s emerging sense of herself as someone with her own desires and her own values and her own right to make decisions about her own life rather than having those decisions made for her by the adults who have organized themselves around her talent. Michele Kwasniewski’s more than fifteen years in film and television production gave her the industry knowledge to make the music world feel real, but it is her understanding of what it actually costs to become yourself inside a world that has very definite ideas about what to do with you that makes the novel genuinely valuable.
Dani at fifteen is surrounded by people who want things from her talent. Her mother wants the fame and the financial security it represents, has structured Dani’s entire childhood around the pursuit of it, and has made the boundary between what she wants and what Dani wants so porous that Dani cannot always tell them apart. Martin wants the artistic satisfaction and the professional validation of developing a performer of Dani’s caliber, and has his own history with the industry and his own interests in the arrangement he proposes that give his actions a complexity beyond simple generosity. Redman wants the commercial product that Dani’s talent can produce, recognizes that talent immediately and genuinely, and also operates within a way of doing business that has not made his primary concern the wellbeing of the performers he signs. Sean wants the girlfriend who exists outside of all of that, the Dani who was present before the career arrived and who is becoming increasingly difficult to reach as the career makes its demands.
What Dani wants is the question the novel is built around, and Kwasniewski wisely refuses to answer it too quickly or too cleanly, letting it remain genuinely open while Dani accumulates the experience that will eventually allow her to address it with something approaching clarity. That refusal to resolve too early is one of the novel’s most important qualities, because it reflects an honest understanding of how adolescent self-discovery actually works. Dani does not arrive at a single moment of decisive self-knowledge that resolves all of the competing claims on her life. She begins to understand what she wants through the accumulated experience of navigating situations that are not quite aligned with it, and that process is rendered with the patience and the psychological specificity of a writer who takes her protagonist seriously.
The industry detail surrounding all of this is specific and credible, drawn from Kwasniewski’s direct professional experience rather than from research or imagination. The relationships are complex in ways that reflect real human beings operating inside real professional systems rather than fictional archetypes fulfilling narrative functions. The emotional costs are made real by the care with which Kwasniewski has made the relationships and the life that the career threatens into things the reader genuinely values.
Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski centers the question of what a young woman actually wants inside a story about what everyone around her wants from her, and it asks that question with honesty and genuine care. Dani Truehart’s most important journey begins there, and the novel is available on Amazon.
