Sometimes the chance of a lifetime comes along and we blow it. Sometimes we get a second chance at the gold ring, sometimes we don’t. Katie Sandford lands an interview at The Line, a music magazine, her dream job, and then promptly blows the interview by showing up still drunk from the previous night; to make matters worse, it is Katie’s thirtieth birthday, though most of her friends think she is a twenty-five year old graduate student, and this was the best prospect of a job she has had in a long time. And then she gets a second chance. The magazine’s more gossip driven sister publication contacts Katie and offers her a chance for a tell-all story on Hollywood starlet Amber, The Girl Next Door, who has just entered rehab---again. The only catch? Katie also has to enter rehab and go through the process as her cover. As Katie begins the detox process she begins to recognize that maybe she did have an alcohol problem and that maybe rehab isn’t all a waste of time. What she doesn’t expect is that she and Amber will become friends and when it is time to write the tell-all it somehow doesn’t see as great an idea as when it was first proposed to Katie.
Katie undertakes a journey of self-discovery in Spin and many readers will recognize something of themselves in Katie. The journey, however, is long, maybe fifty to one hundred pages too long. There is realness in Katie’s introspective reflection and realization that she may have a problem and the willingness to deal with and attempt to overcome it and the other patients in rehab with Katie put faces to the different forms addiction can take. There is a genuineness and compassion to Katie’s story that help move the narrative along even in some of the slower passges.
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