By: Macie Forman
First-person narration in YA fiction is one of the more difficult things to get right consistently across the full length of a novel, because it requires a writer to inhabit an adolescent consciousness fully enough to render it accurately without either condescending to it or projecting adult awareness and sophistication onto it in ways that make the narrator feel older than they are supposed to be. Michele Kwasniewski gets it right in Rising Star, and the result is a Dani Truehart who feels genuinely fifteen in all of the ways that matter most. Her self-critical inner voice after performances, her awareness that something is off about some of the arrangements she has entered into without quite being able to name what, her fear that the relationship with Sean is being sacrificed to a career she is not entirely sure she chose, her genuine joy in her own talent when it is working, her genuine doubt when it is not, all of these are calibrated precisely to a fifteen-year-old’s sensibility rather than elevated toward adult clarity or simplified toward childhood limitation.
That voice is what carries the reader through the novel’s more complex territory, the industry dynamics that Kwasniewski’s fifteen-plus years in film and television production allow her to render with specific accuracy. The details of how professional entertainment relationships actually work, how contracts get offered and accepted in contexts where the power differential between the parties is significant, how guardianship arrangements function and what they ask of the person inside them, how genuine talent can be simultaneously celebrated and exploited by the same set of professional relationships, all of this is filtered through Dani’s first-person consciousness in ways that make it feel experienced rather than explained, felt rather than analyzed.
The emotional life of the novel is as carefully managed as its industry portrayal, and the two dimensions work together rather than competing for the reader’s attention. Dani’s relationship with Sean is the thread the reader follows most anxiously, because it is the thing most entirely her own in a life that is steadily being organized around other people’s interests and other people’s visions of what she should be. His genuine connection with Dani and his enough interiority of his own to make the threat the career poses to what they have feel like a real and ongoing cost rather than a convenient source of dramatic tension.
Her family situation, the overbearing mother and the father she wishes would stand up to her, her sister and her friends who knew her before the career arrived, all of these give her a world that the music industry is steadily working to replace, and Kwasniewski keeps the value of that world visible throughout, which is why the replacement feels like a loss rather than simply a change.
If you want a YA novel with a first-person narrator who sounds genuinely fifteen, thinks genuinely fifteen, and navigates the world with both the capabilities and the limitations of fifteen, Rising Star by Michele Kwasniewski is one of the best examples currently available. Grab your copy on Amazon today and let Dani’s voice do what the best YA narrators have always done: make you feel less alone in your own experience.
