The Blondes by Emily Schultz

Rating: Dull Eyed - 2/5
Release Date: August 14th, 2012
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Pages: 400
Source: Goodreads first read program (thank you!)
Series: Stand Alone

First, a quick summary from Goodreads:

"Hazel Hayes is a grad student living in New York City. As the novel opens, she learns she is pregnant (from an affair with her married professor) at an apocalyptically bad time: random but deadly attacks on passers-by, all by blonde women, are terrorizing New Yorkers. Soon it becomes clear that the attacks are symptoms of a strange illness that is transforming blondes--whether CEOs, flight attendants, skateboarders or accountants--into rabid killers.  Hazel, vulnerable because of her pregnancy, decides to flee the city--but finds that the epidemic has spread and that the world outside New York is even stranger than she imagined. She sets out on a trip across a paralyzed America to find the one woman--perhaps blonde, perhaps not--who might be able to help her. Emily Schultz's beautifully realized novel is a mix of satire, thriller, and serious literary work. With echoes of Blindness and The Handmaid's Tale amplified by a biting satiric wit, The Blondes is at once an examination of the complex relationships between women, and a merciless but giddily enjoyable portrait of what happens in a world where beauty is--literally--deadly."

When I read the premise for The Blondes, I expected it to be a somewhat funny book. Instead, I got the complete opposite of that. The tone for the whole book was serious and all I could think of through the whole thing was, "Someone is actually taking this plot seriously? Okaaaay." Which, therefore set the tone for me and caused me to give this book to Dull Eyed review.

Because of the difference between what I was expecting from this book and what I got from it are two completely different polar opposites, it made it really hard for me to get into the book and took me forever to read. Now, I'm not saying that this book is bad in anyway, and it did somehow get more interesting towards the end of the book, but as I said, I just had a hard time getting into it.

I will admit, I first entered the contest on Goodreads because of the cover of this book. I mean, I've never seen anything like it with all of those hair sample colours and it just looked so... cool. Let me tell you, that will probably be the first and last time I ever pick up a book based on it's cover.

I found the pacing of this book to be really slow and almost unbearable at points. Nothing really intrigued me or had me dying to turn the next page.... And the chapters were just so long! I don't know about you guys, but I hate long chapters (Anything over 10 pages I consider long chapters). I find that short chapters in a book make me feel like I accomplish more and also help me to continue reading a book late at night.

The story is told in first person by Hazel to her un-born child, re-accounting memories from just before the Blonde Plague took over up to when she finally has the child. The book almost seemed like an auto-biography of her life (which I guess it was), with stories that kind of jumped from one time frame to another. I believe at one point their were three or so different time-line stories occurring.


All in all, I didn't really enjoy this book because my expectations were so botched that it just kind of ruined the book for me. If I had different expectations, I'm sure I would have enjoyed this book much more than I had.