Tessa Bailey is originally from Carlsbad, California. The day after high school graduation, she packed her yearbook, ripped jeans, and laptop and drove cross-country to New York City in under four days. Her most valuable life experiences were learned thereafter while waitressing at K-Dees, a Manhattan pub owned by her uncle. Inside those four walls, she met her husband and her best friend and discovered the magic of classic rock, and she managed to put herself through Kingsborough Community College and the English program at Pace University at the same time. Several stunted attempts to enter the workforce as a journalist followed, but romance writing continued to demand her attention. She now lives in Long Island, New York, with her husband and daughter. Although she is severely sleep-deprived, she is incredibly happy to be living her dream of writing about people falling in love. Catch her on TikTok at @authortessabailey or check out tessabailey.com for a complete list of books. You can find more of my reviews of Tessa's works here.
Georgette Castle's family runs the best home renovation business in town, but she picked balloons instead of blueprints and they haven't taken her seriously since. Frankly, she's over it. Georgie loves planning children's birthday parties and making people laugh, just not at her own expense. She's determined to fix herself up into a Woman of the World . . . whatever that means. Phase one: new framework for her business (a website from this decade, perhaps?) Phase two: a gut-reno on her wardrobe (fyi, leggings are pants.) Phase three: updates to her exterior (do people still wax?) Phase four: put herself on the market (and stop crushing on Travis Ford!) Living her best life means facing the truth: Georgie hasn't been on a date since, well, ever. Nobody's asking the town clown out for a night of hot sex, that's for sure. Maybe if people think she's having a steamy love affair, they'll acknowledge she's not just the "little sister" who paints faces for a living. And who better to help demolish that image than the resident sports star and tabloid favorite? Travis Ford was major league baseball's hottest rookie when an injury ended his career. Now he's flipping houses to keep busy and trying to forget his glory days. But he can't even cross the street without someone recapping his greatest hits. Or making a joke about his . . . bat. And then there's Georgie, his best friend's sister, who is not a kid anymore. When she proposes a wild scheme—that they pretend to date, to shock her family and help him land a new job—he agrees. What's the harm? It's not like it's real. But the girl Travis used to tease is now a funny, full-of-life woman and there's nothing fake about how much he wants her . . .
Bailey is a great writer, in the sense that she can really hook readers by writing characters with strong and compelling voices, even if they aren't immediately relatable. Travis and Georgie both have their own demons to fight, some of which are more relatable than others, but the overall theme being that these are two people who are stuck on how to move forward in their lives after being rejected, basically, by what they care about the most. For Travis, that's the baseball world, which rejected him after an injury; for Georgie, that's her family, who has rejected her all her life because she is the youngest sibling. While I took issue with how Travis was portrayed post-injury and how Georgie never learned to truly stand up for herself to her family, these characters do have relatable elements that make you wish that they would have fully developed more at the end.
I especially want to dive into Georgie's character. I was super interested in how she was going to turn her one-woman clown act into a full-grown entertainment business. She loves kids and wants a family, despite feeling rather left out of her own. I wanted to know how much younger she was compared to her siblings, seeing as how her entire family still talks down to her despite Georgie being twenty-three and an up-and-coming entrepreneur. Georgie is a light-hearted character who is able to pull Travis out of his funk and even inspire other women to become the best versions of herself, which makes her a great lead in the first book in the series; however, I was left wondering about her situation when the book ended. Did she end up moving forward successfully in the entertainment scene? How is that working with her new life with Travis? How does she learn to stand up for herself to her family and to bad clients? I really felt like there was a lot left unexplored in the novel related to Georgie's growth, and seeing more of it would have convinced me to add a star back to the review.
The supporting cast consists of Georgie's siblings Bethany and Stephen, and their mutual friend Rosie. The women especially were strong, and they do end up as the leads of the future books in the series. While I may get answers to my above questions in their novels, I do hope it won't detract attention from those women's stories. Bethany and Rosie help support Georgie on her journey to becoming her own women, but I really did not like the way this type of transformation was phrased. While I understand the need to sometimes glam yourself back up, the connotation around Georgie's makeover made it seem absolutely necessary in order for her to become someone worthy of Travis. I just don't think this sends all the right messages to readers, despite being a rather mild part of the plot. I loved the depiction of Georgie and her girl gang, but could have done without the connotation that one needs to constantly change instead of embracing who you really are.
Overall, Fix Her Up is an enjoyable and light read that can detract from a gloomy weekend, but it wouldn't be on a top 100 list of rom-coms I'd recommend to friends to take the time to read unless they were looking for something like this specifically. I'm excited to read the rest of the series, though, and wonder about the other women's stories and am curious to see how Bailey grows as a writer over the course of the trilogy. Catch her on TikTok at @authortessabailey or check out tessabailey.com for a complete list of books. You can find more of my reviews of Tessa's works here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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