Rowena’s review of Don’t Call Me Baby by Gwendolyn Heasley.

All her life, Imogene has been known as the girl on THAT blog.

Imogene’s mother has been writing an incredibly embarrassing, and incredibly popular, blog about her since before she was born. Hundreds of thousands of perfect strangers knew when Imogene had her first period. Imogene’s crush saw her “before and after” orthodontia photos. But Imogene is fifteen now, and her mother is still blogging about her, in gruesome detail, against her will.

When a mandatory school project compels Imogene to start her own blog, Imogene is reluctant to expose even more of her life online…until she realizes that the project is the opportunity she’s been waiting for to tell the truth about her life under the virtual microscope and to define herself for the first time.

Don’t Call Me Baby is a sharply observed and irrepressibly charming story about mothers and daughters, best friends and first crushes, and the surface-level identities we show the world online and the truth you can see only in real life.

I was interested in reading this book because as a blogger, it seemed interesting to read about a young woman who grew up in the public eye as the subject of her Mom’s blog.

Imogene has never known a moment in her entire life where she wasn’t the main topic of her Mom’s blog, Mommylicious.  She’s always been Babylicious and as a young woman heading into her 9th grade year, she hates everything about the blogging world, including her Mom’s blog. So when school starts and her English teacher assigns each of her student to keep an online writing journal (a blog), Imogene and her best friend Sage (who is also a blogger’s kid) come up with the plan to strike back against their Moms and their blogs. But over the course of the book, you see that Imogene learns that sometimes striking back and hurting people isn’t the way to get your point across and while I liked that, I felt this book was slow moving. Things happened so slow in this book. I wanted to fast-forward through a lot of the middle parts to get to the ending, to see how things turned out.

Imogene did great as a main character. You really saw her character grow over the course of the book and while I was glad with the person she grew to be in the end, there were still times when I wanted to shake her.  Not nearly as many times as I wanted to shake her best friend, Sage but still, I wanted to shake a whole lot of people in this book.

Sage’s Mom isn’t a Mommy blogger, but one of those vegan foodie bloggers who wants to revolutionize diets around the world. She pushed her beliefs on her daughter Sage and Sage really grew to resent her for it.

Both girls try to get their Moms to hear them but their Moms were so wrapped up in themselves and in their blogs that nothing the girls said or did worked so Sage continued the strikes and the attacks against her Mom on her blog while Imogene tried to unplug from the internet. This caused some drama between both Sage and Imogene but alls well that ends well.

I thought this book was going to be a fun, summer romance kind of book but that wasn’t what I got at all. I got a deep book about growing up in the spotlight and trying to get your freedom (and privacy) back. There were times when I wanted to strangle Imogene’s Mom because she was so wrapped up in the wrong things. Her whole, “My way or the highway” attitude pissed me off and made me feel bad for Imogene.

In the end, I thought Heasley did a good job of wrapping things up. Things ended the way that they were supposed to and life lessons were learned.  So while I didn’t exactly love this book or get what I was expecting, it was still a solid read.

Grade: 3 out of 5

This book is available from Harper Teen. You can purchase it here or here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.