Synopsis:
Johnny spots her ex, Alice, at the local cafe with a vague sense that she’s been there before. Though she’s still angry about their breakup and Alice’s subsequent ghosting, Johnny can’t resist the draw of a second shot at their relationship and accepts Alice’s invitation back to her apartment. Once there, promises are exchanged. There’s talk of wonder and change and dreams made real. But after spending the night together, they face a morning in which Alice is still Alice, Johnny is still Johnny, and the dog has doubled in size.
Over the course of a week, increasingly bizarre changes in the world around them force Johnny to consider whether the pair can change just as easily, if they can change at all. Or if both her relationship and the bounds of reality are destined to implode. The narrative of I Can Fix Her operates on nightmare logic, putting forth an irresistible tale in which the world, the narrator, and time itself are not to be trusted.
Review: (MILD SPOILERS!)
Rae Wilde has built a whole brand on sapphic horror romances in which there are no clear “heroes.” Her characters are deliciously messy, human, and, occasionally, evil. I Can Fix Her brings all of these elements into a slightly more science-fictiony corner of the realm of speculative writing, creating a Groundhog Day from hell, where two estranged lovers get to act out the same nightmarish, reality bending week, over and over again.
If that description feels like something you can get your head around, I promise you this book is much stranger. In the world of I Can Fix Her, nothing is stable: time, identity, the shape of the dog. These things morph and distort with the logic of a dream. Doors open onto new rooms. People die and come back. Love has a chance to blossom just before the knife goes in.
The still center of the spinning world is the link between Johnny and Alice and the fact that they are both, frankly, terrible. The book gets a lot of mileage out of the title’s pronoun, “her,” with either character acting as its antecedent. They are both broken, both caught in an ugly cycle of something they’ve convinced themself is love.
There’s also a mysterious first person narrator who sometimes intrudes on the story, sometimes intruding on the action. It’s all a bit of a highwire act.
The ending reads as a kind of demonic version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and that’s fitting. We know this isn’t going to go well, just like we knew from the first page it wasn’t going to go well. But we’re along for the ride, fully invested, in part because of Wilde’s prose, which is both crystal clear and lyrical.
Reading I Can Fix Her is a bit like watching that one friend make the same terrible decision over and over again, knowing that what she really needs is a good therapist, while also knowing she ain’t going to do that. Only this is actually fun.
I Can Fix Her will be released by Clash Books on June 3rd, 2025.
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