By: Alfred Naider
There is a conversation that young people aiming their ambitions toward entertainment careers rarely get to have with someone who has been inside those industries and can tell them honestly what it actually looks like from there, what the daily reality of professional relationships and power dynamics and commercial interests actually involves, and how a person with genuine talent can find themselves in situations that are both genuinely exciting and genuinely concerning at the same time. Michele Kwasniewski spent more than fifteen years inside film and television production before she wrote Rising Star, and the novel she produced is as close to that conversation as fiction can get, offered with the honesty and the specificity that only direct professional experience makes possible.
Dani Truehart’s story is accurate in the specific sense that matters most for a YA novel about the entertainment industry: the sense that shows how the promises and the complications of a music career tend to arrive together, how genuine opportunity and dubious arrangement coexist in the same contract, how the adults who have power over a young performer’s career have interests in her talent that are real but not identical to her interests in her own life. Kwasniewski renders these dynamics with the specificity of direct professional knowledge, and the result is a portrait of an industry that neither glamorizes what deserves scrutiny nor dismisses what deserves genuine celebration.
At the center of it all is Dani, who is fifteen and talented and caught in the gap between the career she has been trained for and the self she is still in the process of discovering. Her first-person voice is rendered with the kind of psychological authenticity that reflects careful attention to how adolescents actually think and feel and process the world, and her doubts and her ambitions and her fears and her genuine pleasure in her own talent are all present and all specific in ways that make her feel like a real person rather than a narrative construct designed to carry a particular kind of story.
The supporting characters are built with equivalent care. Her vocal and dance coach Martin is drawn with sustained moral ambiguity rather than resolved into trustworthiness or exploitation. Music producer Redman is specific and recognizable rather than generically dubious. Her boyfriend Sean is given enough genuine presence to make his relationship with Dani and the threat to it feel real. The family dynamics are complex in ways that reflect how family situations actually are rather than how they are conveniently arranged in fiction. All of this reflects the same commitment to honesty that makes the industry portrayal so valuable.
Rising Star is the first book in a series that promises to trace Dani’s full story with the same honesty and the same industry knowledge that make this opening volume so genuinely valuable for its audience.
Readers can find Rising Star on Amazon, where the novel is available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook editions.
