Blondes may have more fun, but in The Blondes, the satirical novel from Emily Schultz, they pay a hefty price: their sanity and their lives. Blondes—both bottle- and gene-based—are susceptible to a mysterious virus that turns the women into blond bombshells, with rabies-like symptoms that induce them to murder and mayhem. It is not a pretty sight, but it makes for highly entertaining reading.
It begins with our hapless heroine, Hazel Hayes, pregnant and abandoned at an Ontario cottage, recounting the story of her predicament to her fetus. Hazel had moved from Toronto to New York City to write her thesis on “what women look like and what we think they look like.” It is related to a new field of study called aesthetology (the study of looking), which “began when the Harvard School of anthropology created an advanced course of studies in partnership with Empire Beauty Schools as a way to increase female enrolment in the sciences.”
And so the hilarity...
Barbara Sibbald is a journalist and fiction writer who gets out in nature as often as possible.
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