Reading guide for The Blondes by Emily Schultz

Reading Guide Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. What do you think the author meant with the opening sentence of the book?
2. Did the book make you think about your hair or relationship to beauty, feelings about your hair and identity, rituals surrounding it?
3. Why do you think the author chose "blonde" for a disease affecting women? What did you make of the science of the disease?
4. There are many types of lies in the book - lies the characters tell each other, lies they tell themselves. For example, Hazel often says she's not going to continue to talk to her unborn child about an event, but then she does. Larissa, in particular, tells many lies. Grace keeps important information away from Hazel. What do you make of the half-truths and how they lead the characters forward?
5. Which points in the novel does Hazel seem like a victim, and at which points a victor? Did she strike you as more one than the other?
6. Hazel is taken into the Women's Entry and Evaluation Center because she has naturally red hair, an in-between color that may or may not put her at risk. She is aloof there. Is it because she views the others as dangerous, or is it for other personal reasons?
7. Hazel has a tormented relationship to her own mother, and to the idea of becoming a mother herself. What do you make of the changes she goes through - both physically and emotionally in relation to her pregnancy?
8. Why do you think the author chose to end the novel where she did?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Picador. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.