Famous Baby
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Los Angeles Times Summer Books Preview selection
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“Famous Baby is inventive, hysterical, and touching. Karen Rizzo wraps a timeless drama about the love between mothers and daughters in a fresh, snappy package for the social media age.” —CHRISTINA SCHWARZ, author of The Edge of the Earth and Drowning Ruth, an Oprah’s Book Club Selection
Before there were Real Housewives and Tiger Moms, the was Ruth Sternberg, the hugely popular First Mother of Mommy Blogging—or, as Ruth’s daughter, Abbie prefers to call her, the First Lady of Cyber Exploitation.
Eighteen year-old Abbie has finally found her way out of the limelight, by moving a solid five hundred miles away from Ruth and her “maternal instincts.” But when she hears that her ailing, beloved grandmother is moving in with Ruth, she suspects that her mother has found a new blog subject to exploit. Abbie kidnaps Grandma to save her from the same fate, and thus begins an uproarious battle of wills. Famous Baby wisely and hilariously explores mother love, identity, and the hazards of parental over-sharing in the social media age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This deft first novel from Rizzo, author of the memoir Things to Bring, S#!t to Do... and Other Inventories of Anxiety, uses a driven professional blogger and her resentful daughter as a springboard for a satirical exploration of the modern American family. After publishing one celebrated novel, L.A. writer Ruth Steinberg fails to deliver a follow-up, instead turning to nonfiction and the popular "Full Nest Blog," mining her own life, and that of her husband, Justin, and daughter, Abbie, for material. Now 18, Abbie is estranged from her mother, whom she has dubbed "the First Lady of Cyber Exploitation" for chronicling Abbie's entire life online. Ruth's newest scheme is to broadcast her dying mother Esther's final days over webcam, but Abbie catches on and spirits her grandmother away to Tucson, Ariz. Ruth, along with Harold Klein, her agent and onetime lover, launches an attempt to find them before word of their escape gets out. Meanwhile, Eric Smith, an earnest young filmmaker, is trying to persuade a skeptical Abbie to cooperate with a documentary about her life as a "famous baby" of the Internet age. Rizzo's wicked takedown of "mom bloggers" concludes on an unexpectedly but convincingly sweet note, making this a very pleasing debut.
