Aly has a talent for fixing her boyfriends. After dating her, they go on to be successful and happy, while she is still looking for love and waiting for the success she deserves. One day, her friends decide to turn her talent into a business. It isn't too long before her "fixer" business meets her personal life as she is hired to "fix" her childhood best friend. She has a complicated history with him and some unresolved feelings.

I really enjoyed this book! I enjoyed the scenes between Aly and Dylan, especially when he finally stopped giving her the cold shoulder. I really loved their friends and how the author portrayed those friendships. They were supportive and gave push back when needed. I could not stand the character of Nicki, which means the author did her job. She was awful!

Thank you to NetGalley for my ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book has a pretty fun and unique premise. The MC had dated so many men who after breaking up with her went on to be extremely successful. When her friends realized that everyone she dated ended up better after she dated them, they decided to turn her ability to "fix a man" into a business. This part of the book was funny and pretty entertaining.

The love story side of this was not for me. The MC desperately wants to go back to her first love that treated her like trash. Don't see the appeal there at all.

I enjoyed probably half of the book and struggled through the other half. I think a lot of people would still find this to be a fun and easy read. I would definitely read more by this author in the future.

Thanks so much to PENGUIN GROUP Putnam, G.P. Putnam's Sons for the chance to read and review this book prior to release. It will be available for purchase on August 2nd.

Fast, easy read! No spice but a cute enemies to lovers book! Not long and could be read in just a few hours!

⭐️ rating: 4.5 STARS ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
📖: women’s fiction, romance
🔥 steam: closed door, just kissing

Guys, I never thought I’d be able to go back to enjoying romance books without steam - but I have been proven wrong! And honestly - continuing to call this a romance is a little off. It’s more of a woman’s fiction with a healthy helping of adorable.

Things I Liked:
✨ Eric & Tola! Their banter with the MC and without was absolutely amazing. I need an Eric in my life. Like right now.
✨ The progression of Aly really coming into her own & realizing that she was seriously underestimating herself
✨ The relationship between Aly & her mom
✨ I honestly just really loved the writing style! I felt like I was talking to & reading about my friends and that made me want to keep turning pages.
✨ While we don’t get a lot of them, I really enjoyed Aly & Dylan’s rapport with each other. You could tell from very early on that these were two hurt people who knew each other very well - both how to build each other up and tear each other down.
✨ THAT ENDING. I cried.

Things I didn’t like:
✨ I wish we’d gotten more of Aly & Dylan’s history (including why they fell apart) earlier in the book. You don’t get to hear Dylan’s side until way too far in.
✨ The last few chapters felt rushed? Like - everything that happened in them was well built up in the book, but the actual execution of the ending felt too fast.

This book may end romantically, but it’s really about finding yourself, loving yourself, and realizing that you are enough. And I think that’s something a lot of people don’t hear enough.

So in case you didn’t know, you are enough. You are worth it. You are amazing just the way you are.

Im such a huge fan of second chance romance so this book was the perfect read! Add this book to the long list of great romcoms coming out during the summer time. I really liked Aly's character and she was someone I could relate to. Surprised to see that this is a debut novel and I am looking forward to more books by this author.

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.