Rating: 
Summary: Devastating
Review: I finished this book feeling raw, hopeless, tired, desperate. Never before has an author drawn me in to the thoughts and emotions of a character so completely. How did Oates make me identify so thoroughly with a character whose life and experiences are so different from mine? Perhaps some of it is Oates's talent and some of it is the magic of the Marilyn we collectively create: this glorious blank canvas upon which women can project their most outrageous fantasies and fears.
Rating: 
Summary: Shocking, Gritty and Stirs the soul
Review: When I read "Blonde : a novel" I expected a diary-styled adaptation of Norma Jeane's life but this novel is truelly in a league of its own with its biographical, grotesquely informative adaptation of the legends life. It stirs you when you read of her childhood and her persistance to love her mother who never wanted to love her. Her gradual ascention to show business fades Norma Jeane out as you see her fall victim to slavery under the strict authority the Studio had over her. Her failure to have a family, a loving marriage and even string together her own life is depicted so graphically that when you read this book you relate to Norma Jeane in a very personal way. I thoroughly suggest that you read this book to inspire your opinions of this beautiful, intellegent woman who was rightly portrayed as a candle in the wind.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting attempt to capture the intricate Marilyn
Review: I've always been fascinated with Marilyn Monroe. Everything she was, the sex symbol, the actress, the vulnerable little girl inside, is fascinating. So naturally I had to read "Blonde." I was NOT disappointed.It delves into Norma Jeane's FICTIONAL thoughts. This is not meant to be totally biographical, folks. Blonde tells us about Norma Jeane's early days, her first marriage, and about Cass and Eddy G., neither of whom have been mentioned in any Marilyn bios that I know of.
The chapters I disliked most were the "stream of consciousness" where nearly every sentence was joined by an ampersand, but the way JCO decided to deliver those chapters was excellent and, in my humble opinion, quite accurate. Anyway, since I'm starting to ramble, I'll cut it short. "Blonde" is an excellent novel that lets us see what MAYBE Marilyn/Norma Jeane was thinking and feeling. I applaud JCO for her work.
Rating:
Summary: The Perpetual Marilyn Monroe Phenomenon. . .
Review: What it is about Marilyn Monroe that continues to mesmerize and fascinate both men and women generation after generation? Few show-biz celebrities have drawn and held the attention of so many for so long, and that rapt idolization doesn't seem to be ending any time soon. The first time I saw Marilyn Monroe on the screen was in "Don't Bother to Knock" and I was stunned by her beauty and appeal. That was awhile ago, and that impression has not changed throughout the years. Whatever ingredients it takes to create an immortal goddess, Marilyn had them and even 40 years after her death, continues to hold her position on the throne uncontested. With that said, her attempts at acting were so bad,I was uncomfortable and embarrassed watching her on the screen. From the very beginning of her career, she was taught to contort her body movements, facial muscles, voice and speech to conform to a few movie moguls' conception of what "super-sexy" was. But I saw it as so unnatural and contrived that it reduced her presence to the level of an animated cartoon character. Despite that charade however, she remains the fairest of them all, so who am I to argue with success? I read the book as a novel and was not distracted nor disgusted with Joyce Carol Oats for taking literary license to weave fiction into fact. Nobody knows the whole and complete truth about Norma/Marilyn's life except she herself and so all else that has been written of her is incomplete, partially true and in many cases, inaccurate. "Blonde" is a fascinating read and after finishing it a few weeks ago, I find myself still mulling over this compelling and interesting version of the life and death of Norma Jeane Baker into Marilyn Monroe.
Rating: 
Summary: Good idea gone bad......
Review: What started as an interesting idea for a Book turned into this rediculous nonsense....honestly, i couldn't even read the whole thing. If this is the first book somebody reads about marilyn that never read anything about her before, that person will get an inaccurate, distorded view of marilyn and somebody else's imagination.
Stick to the real Biographies if you want the real story and this type of thing if you want pure fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: I could not put this book down. It sucked me in and held me hostage. I am not a Marilyn fan or non-fan; I read the book because a friend let me borrow it. Ignore the negative reviews by the people who just didn't get it. Oates must have been channeling Marilyn-it seemed so real that I had to remind myself that it was a work of FICTION. Beautiful, heartbreaking. It left me devastated.
Rating:
Summary: The Anguish Issue
Review: The problem with an intimate, lingering involvement with Marilyn Monroe is that as soon as the moment of the gorgeous photograph is passed, the lens clouds and there's just too much pain. It isn't any easier to read because we know the main events, they don't sting less. We are not really prepared. She does become less beautiful, but the draw is still intense, like being caught in some undertow. She moved through life's tides, without an anchor, and eventually, all who loved her ended up feeling that they too were drowning. She was as Truman Capote wrote, in an essay that remains a brief, crystalline distillation of her, "a beautiful child." She had no self-protective guile, she was a goddess, but not constructed for the business of being mortal. Tom Robbins wrote a phrase that I feel is applicable to Marilyn. Paraphrased, it states, `she wasn't naive, nobody taught her to be afraid of the things the rest of the world has been taught to fear.' Oates has earned my respect as a writer but never my affection. I am temperamentally too susceptible to themes of darkness, due perhaps to my own lightweight anchor, but in Blonde, that darkness is mercifully subdued. Through a complex but flowing fugue state of narrative interplay, the truth is not compromised but the blows are restrained. Here is an example. Pregnant with Arthur Miller's child, we can almost feel the sensations of her body. A while later we are removed from Marilyn and we feel Miller's apprehension when she comes home late and nasty with a smell of alcohol on her breath. Later, we are outsiders as we watch her double up in pain, followed by a trail of blood. Through our various incarnations, we have developed a protective detachment with regard to the end of a pregnancy which had it been otherwise would have been either incomplete or unbearable. The brilliant technique forged by Oates in terms of the shifting point of view but also in the fact/fiction genre is perhaps a female counterpart to Capote's revolutionary journalistic counterpart which debuted in "In Cold Blood." Oates' consciousness, with the benefit of forty years' of neurological advancement, is not stream, but postmodern flow. At times a feverish, vivid dream, then normal waking, to ordinary slumber. Surprisingly, the effect is not schizophrenic but far more 'sane' than the subject's life. The other players have all been written of before. One new one stands above the rest however. That is her makeup man, who literally gave birth to her each day. He worked as a true artist, heedless of time, with a sorcerer's power to resurrect 'Marilyn Monroe' somehow matching her surface with whatever tiny spirit could be culled from within. He represented us, the fans, assuring that for as long as possible, he would bring forth our star. Of course, in reading, we are also feeling the tension and pressure of the directors and others on the sets as they waited sometimes 10 hours for her to appear, and then were forced to work sometimes throughout the night. The only villains in this story are the infamous Kennedys, especially, Peter Lawford, the designated pimp. No other players were excoriated, and no useless analytical apologies. This is a compelling 700 page opportunity to linger with this alluring and singular phenomenon. I look upon Blonde as a rare opportunity for the devoted to 'be there' for Marilyn to be bared, but not dethroned. One can only imagine that she would have liked that; would have agreed, that Oates served all of us well.
Rating:
Summary: If you have a bit of respect for Marilyn don't read it
Review: The Editorial Review says: "If you like biographies, you'll like Blonde. If you like novels, you'll like Blonde. If you like mysteries, you'll like Blonde".
I like biographies, I like novels and I like mysteries. But I hate Blonde. For me Marilyn counts more than the literary aspects of the novel. If your a Marilyn fan-you'll hate Blonde.
It's another degrading book about Marilyn. Who cares if it's fictious or not - the line between the truth and fiction (lies?) regarding Marilyn's life is blurred enough already but this book makes it disappear. People know that it's fiction but they forget about it while reading it and soon everyone thinks it's all true. If you don't know anything about Marilyn from other books, please don't read it. For Marilyn's sake.
Rating:
Summary: Absorbing and Haunting
Review: It's been nearly a year since I finished this remarkable novel. Truthfully, this book is not a "biography" of Marilyn Monroe, yet it does not posture as one. Instead, this is a work of Joyce Carol Oates's deep and lush imagination following exhaustive research. Her characterizations of familiar icons are so complete that it is hard to see images of these personas and not conjure her descriptions of their actions. Oates strips away the glamour of a woman who has reverberated throughout the collective unconscious and shows the frail tortured mind shaking beneath our perceptions. This is a work of fiction, and it is one of the finest and most complete narratives I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Gotta love Marilyn...
Review: After reading this book, I got an obsession with Marilyn Monroe. This book is one of the best I have read, and I think the author does an excellent job of portraying MM's personality (keeping in mind that it is fictitious, and many events did not at all happen). But I prefer that the book is fictitious, because it helps me accept everything easier. Biographies are so depressing.
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