By: Stephanie Terr
Most people who follow pop music careers see the finished product, the polished performances and the carefully managed public image and the chart positions and the dedicated fan base, and have little sense of the specific, often messy, frequently complicated human process that produced them. Michele Kwasniewski’s more than fifteen years in film and television production gave her an unusually complete view of that process, and Rising Star is her attempt to make it visible to a YA audience through the lens of Dani Truehart’s entry into the professional music world. What she makes visible is not a simple story of talent meeting opportunity in a way that produces inevitable success. It is a more honest account of how a fifteen-year-old with real talent, genuine training, and a complicated family background gets caught up in a set of professional arrangements that are simultaneously her best available path forward and a system in which her interests are not the primary concern of anyone other than herself.
The audition that changes everything is rendered with the specific texture of someone who has been present for many such moments in entertainment careers and knows how they actually feel from the inside. Legendary music producer Redman hears Dani’s first performance and his amazement is immediate and genuine, his recognition of her talent is real, and the offer he makes is a genuine opportunity and a genuine complication in proportions that are genuinely difficult to separate at first encounter. Her dance/vocal coach Martin, whose guardianship creates the conditions for the audition and for the contract that follows, has his own relationship to the industry and his own history with Redman that give the arrangement dimensions Dani cannot yet fully perceive. Kwasniewski maintains the ambiguity of these relationships throughout the novel rather than resolving them in either direction, which is one of the more difficult and more valuable things she accomplishes.
The character work surrounding all of this is what makes the novel more than an industry exposé in fiction form. Dani’s relationship with her boyfriend Sean is the emotional core of the book, the thing most entirely her own that the career is steadily working to displace. He is given enough interiority and enough genuine connection with Dani to make the threat to their relationship feel like a real and ongoing loss rather than a plot device deployed for dramatic effect. Her family situation, the overbearing mother and the father who has the capacity to protect her and consistently fails to use it, gives the domestic context a texture that goes beyond simple antagonism. Her friends and her sister give her a world that knew her before she was becoming a product.
Kwasniewski’s first-person narration for Dani is one of the novel’s most consistently impressive achievements, calibrated precisely to the sensitivities and the gaps in understanding of an intelligent fifteen-year-old moving through adult situations that have not been designed with her wellbeing as the primary concern. She does not sound older than she is. She sounds exactly herself, and that authenticity is what makes the reader’s investment in her ongoing story feel genuinely earned.
Readers who want to understand what the beginning of a pop music career actually feels like, and what it means to be fifteen while that career is happening, will find that account in Rising Star. The novel is available from major booksellers, including the Rising Star listing on Amazon.
