Author: Renee Rosen

Publisher: Berkley

ISBN: 9780593335680

A woman challenges all the norms of society and business when she proposes a new type of toy for her company to create. As she and the others on her core team fight skepticism and obstacles along the way, their journey will lead them to change pop culture and history. Author Renee Rosen dives deep into the boardrooms and the homes of all the key players behind the world’s most famous doll in the excellent novel, Let’s Call Her Barbie.

It's the 1950s, and Ruth Handler is on vacation with her family in Europe when she and her daughter spot a doll unlike any they’ve ever seen before. Even though Ruth’s daughter, Barbara, is a little too old to play with dolls now, she still loves collecting them especially unusual ones. The German doll Bild Lilli is exceptionally unusual.

For starters, she’s a grown woman and not a baby doll. Her curves and her painted expression suggest that she might be a better toy for young men rather than little girls. But Ruth sees beyond Bild Lilli. She sees an opportunity to fill a gaping niche that the market doesn’t even know exists yet.

As one of the founders of the toymaker, Mattel, Ruth and her husband, Elliot, have experienced a variety of successes. Ruth, though, wants to do something truly groundbreaking. She’s wanted to change the perception and the look of dolls for a while now, and Bild Lilli gives her just the push she needs to shove her ideas front and center in the boardroom.

At first everyone resists as hard as they can, particularly key engineer Jack Ryan. In addition to balking at a doll with breasts, Jack has a hundred reasonable questions for how to design a grown woman doll. He’s been integral to the creation and design of so many other Mattel success stories, and he knows how to challenge Ruth like no one else—not even Elliot—can.

Ruth is undeterred. Ever since coming back from Europe, the ideas keep coming. She wants to encourage young girls to think beyond marriage and motherhood. Why can’t little girls also be astronauts and teachers? Why can’t a doll be a role model for all their potential future selves?

Look at her. She’s running a successful toy company while parenting her two children. It’s true that Elliot usually steps in more with Barbara and Ken, their son, but Ruth’s love for her children is resolute. If she can be a working woman with it all, so can a doll and so can thousands of other little girls across the country. Maybe even the world.

Despite those initial naysayers, Ruth presses on. Eventually she brings Jack, Elliot, and many of her core team around to the idea. By hiring key designers to make sure the doll—who they decide to call Barbie—has a wardrobe unlike any other, Ruth knows that Mattel is entering a new era. 

Through countless frustrations, financial and personal setbacks, and many arguments about how Barbie should be launched, how she should look, and whether she needs a man in her life, the team at Mattel will rally time and time again to change the way society looks at dolls, and perhaps even women, forever.

Author Renee Rosen is a seasoned writer in the historical women’s fiction space and is clearly at ease with her main characters in this book. Rosen chooses to focus on Ruth, Jack, and the designers, Charlotte Johnson and Stevie Klein, who come on board to style Barbie’s first looks. While the omniscient narration may throw some readers early on, Rosen’s confident writing style will quickly bring them around.

Rosen doesn’t waste time getting into the crux of the initial problems with Barbie: her acceptance by the team at Mattel and then by customers at large. While the Barbie movie allowed audiences to interact with Barbie herself in a unique way, Rosen takes readers back to the literal drawing board where the doll was born. She shares tidbits of Barbie history in a novel that is compelling, engaging, and fast-paced. Readers will find themselves getting involved in the lives of Ruth, Jack, Stevie, and everyone else and thinking about them when they’re not reading.

Although the book feels like it’s skating across the surface in some scenes and does indulge in minor information dumps, for the most part the novel is an absolute delight. Those who love pop culture history will definitely want to read this one. I recommend readers Bookmark Let’s Call Her Barbie by Renee Rosen.