The Blondes
A Novel
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3.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Blondes is a hilarious and whipsmart novel where an epidemic of a rabies-like disease is carried only by blonde women, all of whom must go to great lengths to conceal their blondness.
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, students or accountants—into rabid killers.
Emily Schultz's beautifully realized novel is a mix of satire, thriller, and serious literary work. With 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A pandemic of a rabies-like virus is turning blonde women, both natural and bottled, into maniacal killers in this satirical novel from Schultz (Heaven Is Small). In New York City, an eager grad student from Toronto named Hazel Hayes becomes pregnant after a fling with her middle-aged married professor, Karl Mann. Now stuck in a remote Canadian cabin with Grace, Karl's drunken, possibly deranged mind-game-playing wife, Hazel relates the fragmented stages of her "ugly affair" to the unborn child she initially wanted to terminate. Schultz spares no raunchy, noisome detail about the blonde rampages, the government's ineptitude in handling the crisis, or Hazel's maternal angst in this protracted meditation on women who think they're the only ones who can save someone else's husband. Not every reader will buy the solution that women only matter when they're dangerous. Like dry, brittle, over-peroxided hair, Hazel's story might look attractive at a casual glance, but up close, those nasty dark roots destroy all the comfortable illusions.
