Let's Call Her Barbie by Renée Rosen ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

She was only eleven-and-a-half inches tall, but she would change the world. Barbie is born in this bold new novel.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

January 2025; Berkley; 978-0593953631
audio, ebook, print (432 pages); historical fiction

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book but once I got into it I thought it was fantastic.  It was a great story about the work behind the scenes to create the first Barbie doll but it also took me down memory lane as I thought about my first Barbie doll.  The first doll was sold in March 1959.  I was past playing with baby dolls but that year, my friends and I all HAD to have a Barbie doll.  We spent endless hours changing her clothes, combing her hair, and making up stories about her life.  The Barbie picture at the end of this review is the exact version that I had.

Ruth Handler, co-founder of  Mattel Toy Company, walked into the board room in 1956 with a doll that she had found in Germany.  She wanted to create this doll for America.  At first, the other members in the meeting were surprised.  This wasn't a baby doll like girls were playing with all over the world - this was a woman with real-life attributes.  They didn't see any way that this doll would be accepted.  But Ruth was a strong woman who insisted that they give it a try.  She assembled a team to work on the creation of the doll - an engineer who used to work for an aerospace company, clothes designers, and engineers started working on what it would take to bring Barbie to the public.  This was a totally new design and they ran into a lot of roadblocks but she felt like this was what little girls needed and insisted that they continue to work on the doll.  In 1959, the first year of sales, Mattel sold 300,000 Barbie dolls and it became the must-have toy for girls.

I found it so interesting to read about all of the challenges that the team at Mattel faced in bringing the doll to reality.  Even after the doll entered the market, there were ups and downs over the years.  During the women's movement, the Barbie doll was deemed as bad for teaching young girls the wrong way to handle their futures.  Mattel countered by introducing Barbie in many different roles -- as an astronaut, a nurse, a doctor, and a pilot to name a few.  

Barbie has never been just a doll—she’s a legacy.

Be sure to read the Author's notes at the end of the book.  She did significant research on the creation of the Barbie doll at Mattel and she shares a little about the real people in the novel and which characters only existed in her mind.  There are also some great pictures of some of the Barbie dolls over the years.

Buy Let's Call Her Barbie at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

    

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