This one is okay. I loved the premise, and I loved the main characters for the most part. Because the plot requires a lot of set up, it's very slow pace-wise. And oh-m-goodness, it is a sloooowwwwwww burn. Probably the slowest of burns I've ever read.

I'm still processing through this one, but it did take me about a week to get through. Easy to put down. Easy to pick back up, but not compelling enough that you can't put it down.

False advertising—this is not a romance novel; it is typical, British chick lit

For at least a decade, Alyssa Aresti (Aly), a 33-year-old career woman, has toiled long hours at what appears to be some sort of PR/advertising/marketing firm. Her superiors are an unrepentantly misogynistic, fifty-something group of privileged, white males who have infected the entire company with a toxic, old-boys-club atmosphere. In all her years in this company, Aly has never simply done her own job. Instead, she has compulsively maintained the role of everyone’s friend and helper, making every employee feel special by routinely inquiring about their families, soothing their egos, cajoling and comforting them and, most of all, compensating for the failings of various lazy and incompetent male coworkers. But though she has worked her tail off at her job, basically carrying the lion’s share of the running of the firm on her back, and has achieved the title of a lower-level manager, for over five years now, she has not received the promotion she desperately desires, head of branding. It is a position she herself suggested to her boss and outlined the duties of, and it would entail a great deal more creativity, responsibility, respect, and a concomitant rise in pay.

Meanwhile, in her private life, Aly is living alone in the same rundown, ugly, London studio flat that she’s rented all these years. As the story opens, Aly has reached the point where she would rather periodically treat herself to solo outings at various entertainment venues around the city rather than ever date again and potentially involve herself in one more of a long string of failed romances. This pessimistic decision is strongly reinforced after she runs into her ex-boyfriend Jason, who was an indolent, unkempt loser when she last saw him the day she walked away from him five years ago. She encounters him at an expensive restaurant, his hair professionally styled, dressed to the nines, with an attractive, adoring, equally prosperous-looking fiancée hanging on his arm. Jason cheerily informs Aly and his fiancée that he owes all of his present success to Aly’s sage advice while they were together.

The next day at work, Aly complains about Jason 2.0 to Tola and Eric, work buddies whom she has never spent any time with outside the office, and whom she describes to herself as the closest thing she has to real friends. Tola is a happily single, twenty-something go-getter who has only been at the company a year. Eric is a gay man who is the same age as Aly, has been at this lousy company as long as Aly, and is as burned out as Aly on ever finding the man of his dreams. After hearing Aly’s tale of self-flagellating envy of Jason, Tola, who is a blunt straight-shooter, informs Aly that it is clear that she does not date mature adults. Rather, she dates male projects, putting all her energy into making their feckless lives better, until she eventually gets exhausted, either dumping them or getting dumped, before she can gain any of the rewards of her labors. Tola says, from observing how Aly does the same thing at the company, that she is convinced this is a pattern for Aly. The boosting of male coworkers has involved, not just initially training them for their jobs, but engaging in long-term hand-holding, to the point of doing a lot of their work for them—and all of them have advanced at work as well. Tola pushes Aly to make a list of her ex-boyfriends, because she is convinced Aly will discover that all of them, like Jason, are successes now, entirely due to Aly.

Aly reluctantly makes the list and discovers that she has had 12 boyfriends in 15 years of dating. Tola and Eric research these men on social media and analyze their lives based on Aly’s definition of success, which she imprinted on each of her lovers, including: marriage, kids, a fancy job, homeownership, and excellent income. Tola and Eric gleefully inform Aly that every single man on her ex list has improved by 87% in that direction. They call this the “Aly Factor.” Initially, Tola says, quite wisely, “Maybe you’re wondering where you’d be if you’d spent all that time and energy on yourself instead?” But, with no conscious awareness of unintended irony, she immediately urges Aly to start making money off her codependent tendencies—tendencies that, we learn soon afterward, Aly has been ensnared in since her early teens, due to being perpetually enmeshed with trying to fix the never-ending misery of her unwillingly divorced mother.

Tola wants to create a business, called Fixer-Upper, as a side hustle while still maintaining their regular jobs. It would be run by herself, Aly and Eric, and women would hire them to upgrade their men in three basic areas: personal hygiene, career aspirations, and willingness to commit to marriage and children, including obtaining necessary skills to be domestically competent. Aly is initially very resistant to the idea of this type of business. None of them has a degree in psychology, and Aly herself only took one college course in counseling and an advanced course in marketing techniques. But Tola says that’s not a problem, since what they would be selling is not therapy. It is “messaging and manipulation,” with the goal of outsourcing the female emotional labor involved in reprogramming their underachieving male lovers and husbands. Ultimately, Aly gives in, and Fixer-Upper is launched. They create a password-protected website to support a word-of-mouth, invitation-only service to preserve secrecy, because it would be disastrous if their male renovation projects were to ever discover that they’d been unwittingly put through re-education camp.

All goes swimmingly, with many heady successes in re-shaping men into their female clients’ ideal mates, until a rich, famous social influencer and former reality-TV star named Nicki hires them to help her app-designer boyfriend become much more successful in his business, more enthusiastic about being a personal prop for her internet presence, and bring him up to scratch with a splashy, media-savvy, pseudo-romantic wedding proposal.

None of the three co-conspirators are impressed with arrogant, narcissistic Nicki, even though, while dickering with her, they get her up from her initial offer of £5000 for her huge and complex boyfriend project to £20,000. While they are separately thinking it over, Aly makes one of her frequent visits to her mother to endure her latest repetitive angsting over her father, only to discover that he is demanding that she sell the home that Aly grew up in and fork over half the profits. This would be an enormous amount, since the house has no mortgage after over 30 years and is currently worth at least £500,000. Aly had always assumed her mother got to keep the house as part of their divorce settlement, but her clueless mother believes this somehow was never officially spelled out. Instead of making the only possible, rational recommendation, that her mother immediately obtain the services of a family-law attorney to protect her legal rights, Aly comes up with the idiotic idea to bribe her sleazy father to back off by offering him as much cash as she can scrape together. (Thereby inevitably encouraging him to return again and again with future, similar threats to her mother that are essentially blackmail.) In order finagle the funds to pull off the most horrendously codependent act of her life to date, Aly impulsively calls up Nicki and proclaims that Fixer-Upper will take on her boyfriend as their next project for a cool £100,000. Nicki initially, understandably, balks at this highway robbery. But she ends by agreeing on the condition that she will only pay the full amount if Aly guarantees a wedding proposal. (There is no mention in the novel that any of this is ever put in writing.)

When Ali tells Tola and Eric that she has taken Nicki’s job, at first they object, until it occurs to them that this is the first time that Aly has seemed really committed to Fixer-Upper, and they ought to encourage her in that attitude. At this point, Aly feels not the slightest tinge of conscience that she has not admitted to them that she has convinced Nicki to pay £100,000. As far as they know, they are only getting one-third each of £20,000. Which means that Aly hopes to gain around £87,000 from this deal to pay off her father. However, all her confidence in her ability to pull off a mind-bogglingly huge manipulation is badly shaken when she meets Nicki’s boyfriend. In a case of the most bizarre coincidence imaginable, the man is Dylan James, her BFF from age 14 to 18. She has not had any contact with him in 15 years, since the day she ghosted him because of a misunderstanding that she was too humiliated and afraid to confront him about.

These are my issues with this novel:

1. The publisher is falsely advertising this book as a romance novel, when it is a classic example of chick lit. In an adult romance novel, the hero and heroine are co-protagonists, and their dual, third-person point of view (POV) is offered. The final destination of the story is always known ahead of time—a happily every after (HEA) for the two lovers, but it is the courtship journey that is the whole reason that fans of romance love this genre. The hero and heroine are onstage, at the very least, over half of the book, and preferably as much as 75% of the story. In contrast, in heterosexual chick lit, the story is written in the single, first-person POV of the heroine, as this novel is. Its core message characteristically amounts to this: heterosexual women should cynically distrust romance, because decent, caring, emotionally mature, prosperous, heterosexual men are almost impossible to find. Instead, a woman should work on herself, her own self-sufficiency and emotional maturity, and look to relationships with fellow women if she wants loyalty and stability, even if some of her female relationships include female relatives who are, much of the time, aggravatingly self-centered and often downright idiotic—which is definitely the case with Aly’s mother. If there is dating or an initial romantic relationship in chick lit, those connections are doomed to failure, because they represent choices the heroine has made in her immature state—and Aly has made endless bad choices in men. A healthy, committed, romantic relationship, with an emotionally mature, financially stable man, is a reward the heroine can only achieve via a successful growth arc across the novel, from clueless immaturity to a state of rational, compassionate, humbled maturity. Unlike in a romance novel, the romance is not the main plot, but is a relatively small subplot. By those criteria, this novel is not a romance. It is chick lit with an HEA-romance subplot. The vast majority of this novel involves scene after scene of Aly’s dysfunctional, codependent relationships and shady, ethical choices for the Fixer-Upper scheme. She and Dylan are barely onstage together as much as 5% of this book.

2. The publisher is falsely advertising this book as a “funny and sharp romantic comedy.” Reading about Aly’s codependency at work and in her personal relationships is anything but funny. It is pathetically sad to the point of being tragic. Aly is a textbook-case of codependency. The prime characteristics of this psychological disorder include: (1) a desire to please everyone around them (a “people pleaser”); (2) an incessant need to fix the people in their life (everyone is a “fixer-upper”), by acting the part of a caretaker and rescuer who feels responsible for the feelings and behaviors of everyone around them; (3) an inability to set clear boundaries (a “doormat”), by perpetually sacrificing their own wants and needs in favor of meeting the needs of selfish, ungrateful others, and self-defining that unhealthy behavior as generosity, helpfulness and loyalty; (4) constantly avoiding confronting conflict directly, instead pasting on a fake smile and pretending everything is fine; (5) Refusing to ask for help of any kind, because that violates their personal identity as eternal fulfiller of the wants and needs of others.

3. Codependency a mental-health issue that is, at best, an entrenched habit, at least worst, a compulsion, and at worst, an addiction. It is not something that is overcome in the snap of a finger, as the author portrays in her simplistic, tied-with-a-pretty-pink-bow HEA. Completely unrealistically, both Aly and her mother (who is in even worse psychological shape than Aly) turn on the proverbial dime and display self-knowledge and insights that most people in a situation as dire as theirs might take years of competent therapy to achieve. But neither Aly nor her mother has ever sought professional counseling for their codependent tendencies, and neither of them has ever even attended any Twelve-Step, Codependents Anonymous meetings, which are free. In addition, as Aly’s first trainee in the dark arts of codependency, Dylan’s personal life is a shambles. He is no more in shape to form a healthy romantic connection with Aly by the end of the book than she is with him, without extensive therapy to deprogram him from 19 years of being a miserable people pleaser, a chameleon who has performed the part of whatever ideal of the “perfect boyfriend” any female lover has desired him to be.

I think if this book is read by fans of British chick lit, they will probably rate it at least 4 stars. If it read by fans of romance fiction, expecting to encounter an actual romance plot, they will be sadly disappointed. As a romance, I would rate this novel as only 2 stars, and that is the rating I am giving it, because the publisher is marketing it as a romance novel, not chick lit.

I never laughed so loud. I loved it! Highly recommend super cute and adoring MC. Perfect read for the springtime

This was such a good cute book! I found myself constantly singing *he’s just a bit of a fixer upperrrrr* (frozen?)
“Love is only meant to be terrifying right at the beginning, right before you fall,” she said softly. “Then it’s meant to feel like home.”

This was such a nice read to binge read In 3 days <3
It had wonderful friendships, a great plot about trying to fix things but realizing they sometimes didn’t need fixing, and friends to enemies to… we’ll you’ll have to read to find out. The main character, Aly was so real and relatable & don’t even get me started on how lovable all the characters are (except Nicki agh) Definitely recommended this to people who like second chance lovers, contemporary romance, and girl bosses 😌

This book will out 8/2/22
{thank you @netgalley for providing me this ARC in exchange for an honest review}

ugh! love me a good romantic comedy!! lauren forsythe did not come to disappoint! very much recommend!

The Fixer Upper by Lauren Forsythe is a cute and fun first novel from this author. I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to ready a fun rom-com romance. Dylan and Aly's relationship is sweet and a great 2nd chance romance. Aly is a great character to read and I really enjoyed reading this one. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Multiple failed relationships, the urge to “fix” people and the need to fall in love all sounded like a great mix for a romcom but I never could get into the story. I never felt like I could connect with the characters, I didn’t feel like the relationships were strong and I lost interest quickly.

Thank you for the ARC! This was adorable and I had a smile the whole way through. If you are looking for a cute, witty, and fun read.. this is for sure it!

I really liked the pace of the book! Dylan and Aly's relationship was so cute. Just seeing them come back together and being able to have a second chance was everything and more. This book was not typically something I'd read but nonetheless still enjoyable!! The book really made me see how you need those supportive people in your life that will help you out while you're helping others. Aly has a tough job/life to uphold and she makes it by with the select few people that really cherish who she is. I would recommend this romcom to anyone looking for a short and sweet read!

This was a quick fun read but one that wont stick with me. Unfortunately I dont like a closed door romance, I need some steam! This book had potential but it was never realized.

This was a cute and fun read. This novel is well crafted and the characters are well developed, you wont be able to put it down. This is a wonderful debut from Lauren. I’m looking forward to more books from her.

I really enjoyed this book! It had me hooked from the first chapter, and kept me on my toes the entire time! I fell in love with the characters and the romance!

Thank you to Penguin Group Putnam and NetGalley for sending me an eARC of this book! I thought the concept of this book was brilliant. Aly, an often overlooked overachiever takes her talents to help men take on more emotional labor, aiding their partners in the process. Of course, when a famous influencer asks Aly to fix her boyfriend, the said boyfriend, Dylan, is Aly's first love. For the first 80% of the book, Aly is completely fixated on making sure Dylan proposes to the influencer. I didn't mind because the book was so fast paced. I also think the conflict toward the end made a lot of sense and wasn't drawn out too long, which I appreciated. I just didn't adore it, which is why I've rated it lower. I also thought the final grand gesture was extremely cringy. But it's a great read if that's what you're looking for!

This was a cute and fun read. I liked the concept of Aly going into the business of "fixing" men with issues. I think we all have a friend who we go to for common-sense advice and help.

I really enjoyed the scenes of Aly and her friends, Tola and Eric. So funny!

I was hoping for a little more steam, but I still really enjoyed the book.

Funny and witty. This rom com was a good time from start to finish. The heroine is constantly trying to "fix up" others and finds herself unexpectedly matched up. A former friends to lovers tropes, minimal steam but a solid story.

"𝘽𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙞𝙙𝙞 𝙗𝙤𝙗𝙗𝙞𝙙𝙞 𝙗𝙤𝙤, 𝘽𝙞𝙩𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙨. 𝙒𝙚'𝙧𝙚 𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜."

2.5⭐

I wanted to love this so much but I just didn't. There were things I enjoyed like the banter between everyone but there was so much I didn't care for.

- This is technically a Rom-Com (which I typically love) but I enjoy...you know....a little more romance. I remember hitting the half way mark and thinking there was absolutely no romance at all and it was a little upsetting.
- I feel like Aly & Dylan didn't the greatest chemistry.
- I get being a feminist is cool and all but this book took it a bit too far where it seemed like men just lacked common sense and couldn't be good at anything.
- I also found the story overall just...boring. I enjoyed bits and pieces of it but I found myself skimming just to get through it.

This was the author's first book, I believe, and it wasn't terrible for a first book. I think there is great potential and I will be checking out a future book of hers!

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Group Putman for the eARC! All opinions are mine and mine alone. :)

Rounding up, bonus star for debut author.

My assumption was that the protagonist would be fixing up her own sweetheart; maybe I should have spent more time reading the book blurb. I needed a breezy romance and this was a good choice. My romances don't need to be overly steamy and this one is perfect.

So the "Fixer Upper" strategy is that coworkers with spouses/boyfriends who need a little "nudge" are put in situations where a discussion (directly or indirectly) is enough to gain the desired results. Three friends from a marketing firm do this as a side business. Of course the protagonist runs across a long lost love. I found the "fixer upping" parts very cute.

Thank you to NetGalley for introducing me to a new author ... and the opportunity to review The Fixer Upper in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Lauren Forsythe the author and G.P. Putnam's Sons (publisher).

The Fixer Upper is a classic former friends to lovers. It was enjoyable to see Aly’s growth throughout this book and the coming together in the end.

Cute book about a girl, Ally, who realizes she can "fix" the lives of guys she dates and turn them from failure to launch types into successful men.. Then, she is hired by a pseudo celebrity to fix up her boyfriend, who is Ally's high school best friend/crusjh.

Not great literature, but great for what it is.

Thank you net galley and Penguin Group Putnam for the preview of this book! The Fixer Upper is the perfect blend of a romantic comedy and a girl boss book. We follow Aly, A mid 30s perfectionist who has a knack for attracting the wrong guys, yet motivating them to be more. When her friends realize that she has an unusual gift in fixing up underachieving guys, they launch a Secret Service to help women ignite change on their men. News of their success spreads like wildfire, and their met with their biggest challenge yet: an influencer wanting to get her boyfriend to propose to her. This book was fun, entertaining, and way less predictable than most flirty novels. I really enjoyed this book and will be on the lookout for more Lauren Forsythe books in the future!