You Spin Me by Karen Grey

Narrated by Vanessa Edwin and Eric Michael Summerer

You Spin Me is the next in the loosely-related series (can be read as stand-alones) Boston Classics by Karen Grey. You might know Grey also as the excellent romance narrator Karen White, now writing romance as well! She’s set her series in the vintage, way-back machine – the 1980s. No cell phones, no Internet – how did we survive back then?

Jessica Abraham is struggling to be a full-time actor, supplementing her income with teaching ballet at an elementary school. Unfortunately, funding for the arts in schools is drying up, and the school is not only switching her ballet class to exercise dance instead, she’s being laid off completely because they’ve hired someone with more experience in that area. Then she loses an audition to a younger woman on her 30^th birthday.

Jess has to ratchet up her auditions and find more paid work, which includes being cast in a part where she has to play down her assets – beautiful hair, curvy body – and what little confidence she has left is soon evaporating. On a late-night drive home from a job, she hears the sultry voice of DJ Callihan Alonso asking a trivia question she knows. Of course, she can’t just call in on her mobile, cuz 1988, so she rushes in, runs upstairs, gets on the phone and gives the answer. While she’s disappointed the DJ didn’t answer, his colleague puts Cal on the line, and she’s able to tell him how his voice kept her awake while driving.

Cal reacts to Jess’s voice – he wants to be sure she’s safe and encourages her to call again every time she has to drive late at night. He’s attracted in a way he hasn’t been before. Pretty soon they have struck up a phone-relationship, and are both feeling all the feelings without ever having met in person.

Meeting in person is not exactly something Cal is looking forward to – he suffered severe burns and scarring on his face and body from a childhood accident and even at the radio station wears a hoodie most of the time. When his boss pressures him to do something to increase the ratings on his overnight shift, something requiring showing his face, he pulls into his shell – he does whatever he can to keep from showing this mug to the general public. So he’s in no hurry to speed things up with Jess.

Jess also suffers from self-esteem problems. She has dyslexia, which meant she was bullied as a child for not being able to read and keep up with the class. She’s developed a lot of coping mechanisms for hiding her dyslexia. She also admits to a friend that she’s lost auditions because she looks “too ethnic” meaning, in her words, not blonde. And when she was 15, she was diagnosed with anorexia; even now she does everything she can to stay in shape, but she still feels the disappointment of not having a ballet dancer’s body after puberty. She’s beautiful but her emotional scars are real, and they’re damaging.

Grey intersperses radio segues between chapters that are another blast-from-the-past way of keeping the vintage feel front and center. The story is sweet but intense, and the first-person point of view keeps the listener firmly in the heads of the protagonists, making the ending conflict suspenseful. Two scarred souls meet and start a healing journey, and it’s realistic in its outlook.

The narration by Vanessa Edwin and Eric Michael Summerer really brought the story to life – they are both seasoned romance narrators with age-appropriate sounding voices for the 30-something characters, as well as accents and changes in tone and pitch that differentiate the others in the cast. A little birdy told me that some of the sound effects were also provided by the author – maybe just a rumor, but listen for the “parrot” sounds mid-way through!

If you’re in the mood for a vintage setting with two lonely people seeking love, You Spin Me should be next on the DJ playlist for you.

Melinda

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