The Mummy Bloggers is a short, easy read and ultimately pointless novel that examines a few months in the life of three fictional Australian’s bloggers:
- The Stylish Mumma: an Instagram Queen B of perfection. Toned abs, gorgeous children, fabulous home.
- The Working Mum: an exhausted but driven mum doing the best she can to juggle her responsibilities and share her story.
- The Green Diva: a keyboard warrior who encourages an ethical and ecologically sustainable way of parenting.
Those are the kindest descriptors for these three women. A more accurate (albeit brutal) description would be:
- The Stylish Mumma: a vapid, materialistic, greedy blight on humanity, who lies without compunction in an attempt to gain more fame and money from her adoring horde of enabling followers.
- The Working Mum: a miserable, boring bottomless pit of guilt and stress, who manages to find fault in everything despite her obvious privilege and wealth.
- The Green Diva: a morally bankrupt attention-seeking fame addict who stands for nothing but picks up the mantle for any cause that will bring her more unearned notoriety.
There is a tenuous link between these three problematic women, centred around a fictional award for parenting bloggers. The added ‘stress’ of competing for this top gong is what pushes each woman to implode her life, neglect her children, and ‘stand out from the crowd’ using any means necessary (faking cancer, promoting anti-vaxxer sentiment, being so careless as to literally get stabbed by a troll).
I had hopes that the author would do something interesting with this story – there is so much potential here.
Unfortunately, there is nothing ground-breaking or progressive in The Mummy Bloggers. The characters are all wealthy white women who, despite running parenting blogs, seem to have little or no regard for actual parenting issues. Their desire for fame and fortune eclipses their children’s rights and needs at every turn. Both the Working Mum and Green Diva are the ‘protagonists’ in the novel, appearing to go on a journey of discovery about the important things in life. Except an accurate reading of the novel reveals that they do not. They are terrible and careless women at the start, and they are no more enlightened at the end. And the fewer words I give to the reprehensible Stylish Mumma, the better. Her character was so over-the-top loathsome that I felt it squandered a real opportunity for a nuanced look at this Instagram stereotype.
I had real hopes that this novel, penned by one of my favourite podcasters, would do something interesting with the Chic Lit genre… That it would push some boundary, or turn stereotypes upside-down, or take any kind of risk in the characters. Had the ending not been so rushed and abrupt, I feel like this whole novel could have been elevated and ‘saved’. But there is no emotional payoff. Perhaps this is being saved for the sequel.
The struggles of these women are insultingly pedestrian and this book was nothing more that fluff. A missed opportunity for sure.
2 empty #stars.