Let’s Call Her Barbies
by: Renée Rosen
narrated by: Abigail Reno
January 21, 2025, Berkley
432 pages
I love my Barbie’s and I love strong Jewish women, so I was excited to check out Let’s Call Her Barbie by Renée Rosen . So excited, in fact, that I neglected to fully read the cover details and went in with a few mistaken assumptions about what would be between the pages. Whoops. Let’s discuss what happened to me, so that you can have an easier reading journey.
I’ve read my fair share of Barbie nonfiction, usually biographies of Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler (check out Barbie And Ruth for a fine example). Let’s Call Her Barbie was multi POV including Ruth, her husband Elliot, her daughter Barbara, and Mattel’s womanizing engineer Jack Ryan. This really worked for me because it allowed me to get a fuller picture of the goings-on at Mattel, however, it came at a cost. The character whose POV most fascinated me, young fashion designer Stevie Klein, was actually fictional. Which I did not realize. You see, Let’s Call Her Barbie, is actually billed as historical fiction! So I spent hours googling Stevie, wondering why I never hear of her before, only to finally realize she was invented.
Going in knowing this is a work of fiction will make your reading ride much smoother, but you might find yourself researching details, like whether Jack Ryan actually could not read (true). The author does address some of the whoppers in the afterward – if I’d read it in advance, it would have spared me the entire Stevie disaster, but I felt compelled to check a lot of other stuff. As a work of fiction, it’s certainly interesting, but the true story is so fascinating that I really didn’t need it to be fictionalized. Others might disagree.
I chose this book as an audio book for my commute, again because I mistakenly thought it was nonfiction. It would have read better for me on paper. I didn’t totally jibe with some of the voices narrator Abigail Reno uses, and I have trouble with multi POV in audio unless those POVS are separate voice actors or one very gifted voice actor that can completely change their narration from character to character (they exist, and I treasure them dearly).
Let’s Call Her Barbie is a worthy addition to the Barbie cannon, but in giving us fictional characters, it leaves off a lot of interesting stuff from Ruth Handler and her children’s lives. I’d recommend reading it in a pairing with some actual nonfiction. And maybe a watching of the Barbie movie to fully round out the experience.