By: Marco Quinn
Michele Kwasniewski is not writing about Hollywood from the outside looking in. She worked inside it for more than fifteen years, starting as a set assistant on major film productions including Independence Day, Face/Off, and Evita and working her way up to production manager on television shows while becoming a member of the Producers Guild of America. The entertainment industry she depicts in Rising Star is the one she actually knows, which is why it feels nothing like the entertainment industry of wish fulfillment fantasy so often portrayed in other Holywood-based stories. In Rising Star genuine talent, dubious arrangements and complicated power dynamics all exist in the same room at the same time, often attached to the same people.
Dani Truehart, her fifteen-year-old protagonist, is the vehicle through which all of that reality is filtered, and Kwasniewski renders her with a first-person authenticity that makes the novel genuinely compelling rather than simply instructive. Dani’s inner life is fully inhabited. Her doubts and her ambitions and her fears and her moments of genuine joy in her own talent are all present and all specific, and the novel never loses sight of the person inside the career even as the career makes increasing demands on that person’s time and attention and sense of self. She sounds fifteen. She thinks fifteen. She processes the world with the specific sensitivities and the specific gaps in understanding of a fifteen-year-old who is developing her capacity to navigate adult situations that have not been designed with her wellbeing as the primary concern.
The supporting cast is built with the same care. Vocal coach Martin, whose offer of guardianship is both an escape and a new set of complications, is drawn without the convenience of simple villainy or simple trustworthiness. He has invested three years in Dani’s development, has genuine investment in her talent, and also has interests in the arrangement he proposes that do not perfectly align with hers. That complexity is maintained throughout rather than resolved, which requires genuine novelistic skill and reflects a writer who understands that real people in positions of authority over young performers are rarely simply one thing or the other. Music producer Redman, who recognizes Dani’s talent immediately and offers her the contract that changes everything, is drawn as the kind of industry figure that Kwasniewski has clearly encountered in various forms across her career, successful and dubious in proportions that only gradually become legible.
Sean, the boyfriend who represents the ordinary life that the career is steadily displacing, is given enough interiority to make his relationship with Dani feel genuinely valuable rather than simply sympathetic. The threat the career poses to what they have is rendered as a real loss rather than a narrative device, because Kwasniewski has made the relationship real first and then allowed the career to press on it.
If you have been looking for a YA series that brings genuine Hollywood insider knowledge to a story about a young woman navigating the music industry with her heart and her sense of self both very much at stake, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the place to begin. Grab your copy on Amazon today and meet Dani Truehart before she becomes the star that everyone around her has been planning for her to be.
