Review: The Blondes

The Blondes by Emily Schultz

Format: Hardcover
Pages:
Published: August 14, 2012
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Genre: Fiction, Suspense

My Rating: 3/5

Summary (from chapters.ca):

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.

Review:

**NOTE: A copy of this book was provided by the publisher.  However, no compensations were made and this review reflects my honest thoughts and feelings.**

Not going to lie, I had SUPER high hopes for this book... like out of the world hopes because I had heard it compared to The Age of Miracles which blew my mind.  The fact that it didn't measure up to my comparason was likely the reason I didn't love it, but nevertheless...

The Blondes had a really cool premise... a bunch of rabid blondes running the world by creating fear and causing chaos everywhere they reside.  Being a blonde, I sort of liked that I would be an attacker and not an attackee... that is, until I actually read how I would be treated and, yeah, changed my mind right quick!  I really found the idea behind the story to be brilliant and the way that Emily Schultz set the stage for the story was great. 

The characters were so-so.  I liked Hazel enough but really found that I didn't connect with her as much as I normally do with the main characters.  Because the story was so disjointed (more on that next), it felt like we were only skimming the surface of her personality and her life history.  As for the other characters... no one stands out to me and they could have easily been interchanged with eachother.

Flow of the story was a major issue with me.  I found it very hard to follow along as we were constantly jumping from current (8 months pregnant Hazel) to past (just pregnant, start of the epidemic) to even more past (relationship with the baby's father).  There was no rhyme of reason for the switches and it often took a while before I realized which 'Hazel' I was reading about.  Also, I thought that not enough time was spent in the epidemic period of time and to me, that was the most exciting of them all!

Overall, this story was a bit of a miss for me.  Good storyline but it just didn't hit home enough.