By: Emily Roberts
Michele Kwasniewski began her entertainment career as a set assistant on films including Evita, a film literally about a young woman’s rise to fame and the complicated human and institutional forces that shaped, exploited, and celebrated that rise. Whether or not that specific experience was consciously in her mind when she began writing Rising Star, the thematic resonance is unmistakable, and the industry knowledge she accumulated across fifteen-plus years on film sets and in television production offices gives that resonance real substance. Dani Truehart’s story is really about what happens when a young woman’s talent becomes the vehicle for other people’s ambitions and interests, and what it costs to remain yourself inside that process. It is a story Kwasniewski’s own background positioned her to tell.
She is too skilled a novelist to make Dani’s situation a simple morality play about exploitation, though the elements of exploitation are present and rendered with the specificity of someone who has watched them operate in real entertainment contexts throughout a long and varied professional career. Martin is not simply a predatory vocal/dance coach. He has genuine investment in Dani’s talent, has spent three years developing it, and has his own complicated history with the industry he is placing her in that gives his decisions a context and a motivation beyond simple self-interest. Redman is not simply a villain. He is a successful producer with a real track record and a way of operating that is neither entirely honest nor entirely dishonest but somewhere in the complicated middle that actual industry professionals tend to occupy, where commercial success and genuine recognition of talent coexist with arrangements that do not always prioritize the performer’s wellbeing above the commercial product.
What makes the novel most valuable for its YA audience is not the industry detail, accurate and illuminating as it is, but the way Kwasniewski keeps Dani’s inner life at the center of the story even as the outer life of her career makes increasing demands on her attention and her sense of self. Dani’s self-critical thoughts after performances, her doubts about whether the people around her have her interests at heart, her fear that the relationship with her boyfriend Sean is being sacrificed to a career she is not entirely sure she chose, her complicated feelings about a father who has the capacity to intervene in her situation and consistently declines to do so, all of these are rendered with the psychological honesty that young readers facing their own versions of ambition and pressure and other people’s expectations will recognize immediately as true.
The prose is direct and emotionally clear without reaching for effect. Kwasniewski trusts her protagonist’s experience to carry the weight of the story rather than inflating that experience with artificial drama. The result is a novel that earns the reader’s investment through genuine connection rather than manipulated feeling.
Rising Star opens The Rise and Fall of Dani Truehart series, which Rand-Smith published in 2020. Paperback, ebook, and audiobook editions are listed on the novel’s Amazon page.
