Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors: Book Review

Pub Date	May 23, 2024
Publisher	Fourth Estate
Page Count	352 pages
Genre	Lit Fic, Contemporary, Adult
Goodreads Star Rating	4.23
My Star Rating	4.5

Blue Sisters Book Summary

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors is a story about four sisters: Avery, Bonnie, Nicky and Lucky. When Nicky dies unexpectedly, the remaining sisters begin spiraling, and it all comes to a head a year later, when they all gather in New York again to prevent their mother from selling the apartment where they grew up. 

Blue Sisters Book Review

It’s so rare to find books about sisterhood that portray sibling relationships accurately, and Blue Sisters definitely did it. It’s a rich, visceral exploration of the dynamics between sisters — the love, the hate, the jealousy, the resentment. And it had me crying from page one. 

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord– tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential– and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.

As the eldest sister, I related most to Avery. She’s determined to present herself as perfect to her sisters, as the one stable thing in their lives, though she’s anything but. And that damages her relationship with them, it alienates her when she needs support. 

But it’s no wonder, when she had to mother her sisters from a young age (her mother openly admits as much). She feels as if she has to guide them, show them the way. And though she loves them dearly, it tires her out too because she needs someone to be that person for her too. 

Bonnie is mellow and kind, a middle child to her core. Her love story with her trainer Pavel was sweet and I truly enjoyed it. Though it did feel as if Bonnie often got lost between her two sisters with much larger personalities. 

Finally, there’s Lucky — self-destructive and often mean to protect herself. I assumed she’d be the hardest one to like out of all Blue Sisters, but she felt real and I just wanted her to get better. 

This book is about addiction as well, and all the forms it takes. And I loved how vulnerable and honest the portrayal of it was. It wasn’t sugar-coated or brushed off. It didn’t even have a conclusive ending. But it was really well-written. 

My favorite parts are definitely those where all three sisters interact and I wish there was more of it. I also loved the part where Avery goes to visit her mother — for some reason, that part stuck with me the most. 

Unfortunately, the ending felt incredibly rushed. Or, perhaps the pacing was a little off overall.

It takes the sisters quite a bit of time to get to New York; once they get there, everything happens very quickly. It might have been better if they were all in New York to begin with. It would allow us to see more of their interactions individually and as a group, as well as dive a little deeper into their complex relationship with their mother. 

And even though Nicole, the sister that died, wasn’t a big part of the novel — other than as a catalyst and a driving force for her sisters — I wish she was fleshed out a little better. She doesn’t have to be this almost perfect, unassuming creature for us to understand why her sisters miss her. She should be allowed to be flawed and messy even though she’s dead. 

The prose gets clunky at times as well. Mostly it’s unassuming and allows the sisters to shine, each in their own chapters and with their dialogue. But then you’ll run into a sentence that goes something like this: “And then she felt something. Cheerfulness. That old-forgotten friend.”

This is not a direct quote, by the way. But it is a fairly accurate representation of what happens occasionally and it pushed me out of the story every single time. It reads like something you would write in a high school essay.

Overall, I loved Blue Sisters. It’s one of my favorite books of the year and one I’ll come back to frequently. I highly recommend reading it, especially if you have sisters of your own. 

Books Like Blue Sisters

• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a story about twin sisters, both Black, but only one white-passing and what happens when she leaves her home and sister forever.
• Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano is a story about four sisters (and their family) and what happens when a man with secrets wants to marry one of them.
• The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo is a story about four sisters and what happens when the son that one of them placed for adoption appears in their lives.