PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
GLOBAL RELEASE, July 27, 2026—U.S. drug overdose deaths climbed roughly 520 percent between 1999 and 2023, according to the CDC.¹ Over that same period, the share of Americans who needed addiction treatment and didn't receive it has stayed persistently high—89 percent in 2015, 80 percent in 2024, according to SAMHSA.²
The math is hard to ignore: the disease is scaling. The number of people finding a way out of it isn't scaling with it.
Recover! Step Work, the second book in Kaylee A.'s A Walk in Recovery series, doesn't try to close that gap with a new program. It offers a return to a very old one—the 12 Steps—made usable again for whoever is ready to actually work them.
A 2020 Cochrane systematic review—among the highest standards of medical evidence—found that Alcoholics Anonymous and clinically delivered 12 Step facilitation outperformed other well-established treatments in producing sustained abstinence and remission from alcohol use disorder.³ The program works. Ask Kaylee A. why the numbers still look the way they do, and she doesn't point to a lack of information. She points to drift.
Recovery today looks different than it did in 1939, and much of that has been good—more pathways, more voices, more ways in. But somewhere along the way, working all 12 Steps with a sponsor has quietly become one option among several, rather than the starting point it once was. And the founding text of the program, written in the language of its era, can be genuinely hard for a newcomer to find themselves inside. Recover! Step Work was written to close that specific distance—not by replacing the literature, but by walking a reader back into it.
There are many 12 Step workbooks. What sets this one apart is where its honesty comes from.
Kaylee A. writes from experience, not instruction. Her first husband died from alcoholism at 35; she was 27. His death is part of why she found her way into recovery, and she has been sober and sponsoring others for over a decade.
Years into that recovery, life brought her to a season she hadn't expected—one loss and crisis piling on another, until something she thought she had already dealt with resurfaced in a way she couldn't ignore. It wasn't the original addiction. It was the deeper disease underneath it—the grip of control, the belief that she could manage it all herself—the same pattern Step 1 had always been asking her to release. She went back to the beginning. Not because the program had failed her, but because it was asking her to go deeper, again. Recover! Step Work opens with that return, and treats it as exactly how the Steps are built to work: never finished, never a straight line, always open to going further.
“Understanding a Step and actually living it are two different things," said Kaylee A. "I learned that from listening to people in the rooms and watching sponsors show me how they worked these Steps in real life, not just what the Steps said. I'm not writing this to hand anyone the answers. I'm writing it the way people walked beside me—including through the parts of my story I haven't figured out yet.”
The book is written for anyone who has already decided to work the 12 Steps—the reader for whom recovery feels urgent and unclear where to start, the reader whose program has gone quiet and needs to be broken open again, and the reader steady in their recovery who's ready to grow further still. It builds forward from the series' first book, Addicted? Start Here, but doesn't require it—a reader is welcome to begin exactly here.
Inside each of the 12 Steps, the book breaks down the original language word by word, names the patterns people commonly fall into without diagnosing anyone, and includes the Step's full set of practices, principles, prayers, and promises, not just the well-known ones. Throughout the book, Kaylee A. shows exactly what doing that Step has looked like in her own ordinary days: the small, specific action, so a reader can see what living the Step actually looks like and find their own version of it, which may look nothing like hers.
Small actions. Big promises. That's the book's tagline, and its method.
Recover! Step Work is the second installment in the A Walk in Recovery series, written for anyone who has already decided to work the 12 Steps—for the first time, the fifth time, or after years of sobriety, with an old pattern resurfacing somewhere new. It is a companion to the Twelve Step program, a sponsor, and the original recovery literature—never a replacement for any of them—and speaks to readers recovering from any addiction, not only alcohol.
• Title: Recover! Step Work
• Series: A Walk in Recovery, Book 2
• Author: Kaylee A.
• Publisher: A Walk in Recovery
• Format: Paperback, Kindle ebook
• ISBN: 978-1-0699692-3-1, 978-1-0699692-4-8
• Release Date: July 27, 2026
• Availability: Worldwide
Kaylee A. has been in recovery for over a decade and sponsors others through the Twelve Step program. Her first husband died from alcoholism at age 35, when she was 27. She writes because working the 12 Steps changed her life. She is the author of the A Walk in Recovery series.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "About Overdose Prevention." https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/index.html
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. "America's Need for and Receipt of Substance Use Treatment in 2015" and "Release of the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health." https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/report_2716/ShortReport-2716.html; https://www.samhsa.gov/blog/release-2024-nsduh-leveraging-latest-substance-use-mental-health-data-make-america-healthy-again
Kelly, J.F., Humphreys, K., & Ferri, M. (2020). "Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs for alcohol use disorder." Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD012880.pub2
This press release references third-party research for context. A Walk in Recovery is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., SAMHSA, the CDC, or the Cochrane Collaboration.
Note on scope: the CDC overdose figure reflects drug and alcohol deaths specifically. Recover! Step Work speaks to any addiction, including behaviors such as gambling or disordered eating, which are measured differently and are not represented in this statistic.
For copies, interviews, or more information, please contact:
Kaylee A., A Walk in Recovery
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Website: awalkinrecovery.com
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