Don't Call Me Baby by Gwendolyn Heasley

This book is about blogging. And there's golf in it. By all accounts, these two factors alone should make me squeal with joy and love this book forever. But unfortunately, I didn't love this book as much as I hoped.

Don't Call Me Baby follows Imogene, also known as "that girl from the blog". Her mom, mommylicious has made documenting Imogene's milestones her career. They get sponsorships and make money advertising from it. However, Imogene hates being that girl. Along with her friend, Sage (aka VeganBaby), they plot to use a school assignment to blog to get their moms to understand their point of view (after their 'moral protest' against blogs fail).

What this blog gets right is how blogging can take up a person's life. All my blogs are small, and this blog doesn't really affect my life other than make me read constantly (as if I need a reason), but my other blog With Love from Japan, Eustacia, has definitely impacted me. Like how Imogene's mom is obsessed with taking pictures of everything, I've definitely felt the need to snap more photos and document more and more. The difference though, is that the longer I blog, the more I try not to include pictures of my friends and family if possible, because I don't want to infringe on their privacy (generally, if their picture is on my blog, I've gotten their ok on it). So while I sort-of understood how Imogene's mom was, I couldn't understand how that lady could let it consume her life to that extent.

Then again, I'm not a particularly successful blogger, so I have less at stake than mommylicious's blog.

Personally, I thought Imogene's plan of honestly documenting her blogger mom's life was brilliant. Which is why I was disappointed when she stopped doing it almost immediately. If the book let Sage (who actually continued with it) have a bigger voice, I definitely would have liked it better. As it is, the book starts of strong, but sort of fizzles out as Imogene never gets the courage to do anything.

So in the end, everything is resolved, which is good, without a climax, which is bad (for the reader). Imogene's mom was annoying throughout the book, yet at the end she suddenly became understanding. That was a bit too unbelievable to me. I found Sage's relationship with her mom to be much more realistic.

Basically, this book has an interesting topic, and it does some things, like describing the life of bloggers, right. I liked the references to golf by Imogene's grandmother and Sage's relationship with her mom. However, the plot was let down my Imogene's largely non-existent conflict with her mom. I would have preferred the book to focus on Sage instead, because I found her story to be much more interesting.

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