By: Jordan Jacobs
Michele Kwasniewski opens Rising Star at the moment when everything Dani Truehart has been preparing for begins to become real, and she understands from her more than fifteen years in film and television production that this moment is not the beginning of a simple story about a dream coming true. It is the beginning of a considerably more complicated story about what it costs to pursue a dream that has never been entirely your own, in a world that has very definite ideas about what to do with your talent and not necessarily identical ideas to yours about whose interests should govern those decisions. That complication is present from the opening pages, and Kwasniewski builds toward it and through it with the patience and the skill of a writer who understands that the most important stories are the ones that refuse to let things be simpler than they actually are.
The audition with music producer Redman is a turning point rendered with the specific texture of someone who has been present for many turning points in entertainment careers and knows how they actually feel from the inside rather than from the outside. Dani’s performance is brilliant, and Redman’s recognition of that brilliance is immediate, and the offer that follows is genuine and complicated in equal measure. The genuine and the complicated exist together in the same contract, in the same relationship, in ways that Dani is not yet fully equipped to separate, and Kwasniewski does not separate them artificially for narrative convenience. She holds them together throughout the novel as they actually exist, and Dani’s growing awareness of both dimensions simultaneously is one of the more impressive things the novel achieves.
Vocal coach Martin, whose guardianship offer creates the conditions for the audition, is drawn with the same refusal of simplicity. His investment in Dani’s talent is real, and his sincerity is genuinely uncertain, and his own history with the industry and with Redman gives the arrangement dimensions that Dani is still learning to perceive. All of this is rendered from Dani’s first-person perspective in ways that feel psychologically accurate to a fifteen-year-old who is intelligent and perceptive and not yet fully equipped to read every adult situation she finds herself inside.
The personal life surrounding the career is given equal weight and equal care. Sean, the boyfriend, is present throughout as the part of Dani’s life most entirely her own, the relationship most threatened by the career’s demands not through dramatic confrontation but through accumulated absence and changed priorities. The family situation, the friendships, the sister who gives Dani a connection outside of the professional world, all of these are specific and carefully drawn, and their gradual displacement by the career’s demands is one of the novel’s most sustained and most genuinely affecting threads.
If you want a YA novel that begins at the moment of opportunity and takes seriously everything that follows when opportunity arrives in the complicated form that actual entertainment careers offer, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is the book that does it with honesty and skill. Pick up your copy on Amazon today.
