By: Matthew McFilt
The setup of Rising Star is one of those premises that contains more potential than its summary immediately suggests, and Michele Kwasniewski draws on every bit of that potential with the skill of a writer who has spent fifteen-plus years inside the world she is describing. The former boy band member turned voice and dance coach who offers Dani his guardianship, the producer with his complicated track record who hears her first performance and offers her a contract that changes everything, the overbearing mother who has shaped Dani’s ambitions from the outside for as long as Dani can remember, all of these characters are built with a specificity and a moral complexity that transforms them from character types into actual people with their own histories and their own interests and their own relationships to the industry that surrounds them all.
Kwasniewski’s Producers Guild experience and her years working on film and television sets give her the industry knowledge to render the music world Dani enters with authentic detail, but what makes the novel genuinely compelling rather than simply accurate is the way that detail is always in service of character rather than itself. The contract that Redman offers is interesting not because of its specific terms but because of what it reveals about how this world values Dani’s talent and what it intends to do with that value. Her coach Martin’s guardianship is interesting not as a legal arrangement but as a relationship whose terms Dani is still learning to read and whose moral dimensions are genuinely uncertain throughout. Her growing awareness of what she may have agreed to is rendered not as a discovery of plot mechanics but as the emotional and psychological education of a fifteen-year-old who is in the process of learning to navigate an adult world that has claims on her she did not fully understand when she entered it.
The personal relationships that give the story its emotional grounding, the romance with Sean, the complicated family dynamics, including the father who she wishes would stand up to her mother, the friendships that pre-date the career, and the sister who gives her a connection outside of the professional world, are all treated with the same care and specificity that the industry material receives. Kwasniewski understands that these are not secondary elements to be sketched quickly and moved past. They are the actual substance of Dani’s life, the thing the career is asking her to reorganize around its own demands, and the value of what is being asked of her only registers clearly for the reader if those relationships have been made real and specific first.
The first-person narration throughout the novel is calibrated precisely to a fifteen-year-old’s sensibility, 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 she will eventually need. That authenticity of voice is what holds everything together and what makes the reader’s investment in Dani’s ongoing story feel earned.
If you want a YA novel about the music industry that earns its authenticity and builds its characters with the kind of specificity and moral complexity that the best fiction always produces, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is exactly the book you have been looking for. Head over to Amazon and get your copy today.
