Title: Let’s Call Her Barbie
Author: Renee Rosen
Publisher: Berkley
Genre: Historical Fiction
{Thank you @prhaudio for the audiobook of Let’s Call Her Barbie by Renee Rosen. It’s narrated by Abigail Reno and I thought she did a fantastic job voicing both male and female characters!}
Short Review: “Because Barbie has never just been a doll—she’s a legacy.” Renee Rosen nailed the legacy of Barbie all while teaching us about the brilliant, strong and tenacious creator, Ruth Handler. She took us behind the scenes of the toy company, Mattel, with its founders, lead engineer, clothing designers, and Ruth at the helm. In a time when women couldn’t even write a check or get a loan without a man cosigning. This book is funny, fierce, fights the patriarchy and is so well done.
“She was only eleven-and-a-half inches tall, but she would change the world.”
When Ruth Handler walks into the boardroom of the toy company she co-founded and pitches her idea for a doll unlike any other, she knows what she’s setting in motion. It might just take the world a moment to catch up.
In 1956, the only dolls on the market for little girls let them pretend to be mothers. Ruth’s vision for a doll shaped like a grown woman and outfitted in an enviable wardrobe will let them dream they can be anything.
As Ruth assembles her team of creative rebels—head engineer Jack Ryan who hides his deepest secrets behind his genius and designers Charlotte Johnson and Stevie Klein (*this is a fictional character), whose hopes and dreams rest on the success of Barbie’s fashion—she knows they’re working against a ticking clock to get this wild idea off the ground.
In the decades to come—through soaring heights and devastating personal lows, public scandals and private tensions— each of them will have to decide how tightly to hold on to their creation.
I found this story to be immersive; Jack Ryan the lead engineer was wild and I couldn’t look away if I tried! I felt like a kid again remembering Barbie, her outfits, Dream House, and so much more. My only quibble is that while it had short chapters and great pacing, it felt too long at well over 400 hundred pages.
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