“Kate Sandford is invited to a job interview at her favorite music magazine and this happens to be on her birthday. She goes out and celebrates both her birthday and the interview the night before, arriving at the interview still rather drunk. She doesn’t get the job.
A few weeks later, she gets a call from the magazine, who also run a gossip magazine. They want to make a deal: if she goes undercover to a rehab facility to follow a famous “It” girl around, they will give her a job at the music magazine afterwards.
Kate accepts and enrols in the rehab programme. She meet It-girl Amber and befriends her, covertly sending back gossip to her new boss.
But Kate gets more and more involved in the rehab programme and it seems that she could do with a 12-step programme herself. She also starts to feel guilty about writing a gossip story about her new friend. Some serious issues need to be resolved before she leaves the programme.
I enjoyed this book a lot. However, I found a lot of elements of the book very unlikely (like a filmstar bringing his personal assistant to rehab, Kate’s parents never wondering where she got the money for the expensive ($1,000 a day) rehab, and many more). That was a pity as it did lower my enjoyment of reading the book. But not much, because it was a fun story.
I would never want to befriend a celebrity because of their status but in Kate’s case, she had to do so for her job (and she seemed pretty obsessed by Amber in the first place). I thought she did it very unobtrusively, which was good. However, I did think the story was too much about her friendship with Amber and not enough about the reason she was there. Her boss seemed to be pretty relaxed and didn’t ask for much. I would have expected him to be more pushy especially because she was not a very experienced journalist yet (and not a reliable person – hadn’t she shown up drunk at her job interview?).
There is also a love story in the book, which is pretty standard in chick-lit. Kate’s love interest was a nice, unassuming person with some good looks as well as a brain, so what else can a girl ask for?
This was a light read in some sense, but it also addressed deeper subjects, such as, what is Kate doing with her life, when are you an alcoholic, do you forsake a friendship only to get a job?”
JudithAnn wrote this review Sunday, February 12, 2012.
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