Jazmyn Mitchell

Blue Sisters has been sitting in my TBR list for, like, a year and a half at this point.

The final verdict in a nutshell after finally reading it: Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters was remarkably fine. Or unremarkably great. One of the two–I haven’t fully decided yet. 

The book deals with the greatest familial tie one could ever hope to experience: sisterhood. It also deals with one of the greatest pains one can hope to never experience: grief. 

And, somehow, it deals with these things well. But it does leave some things to be desired.

Let’s talk about it. 

A Brief Summary

The book operates on a rotating POV system, jumping from the three remaining Blue sisters; we meet them on the anniversary of one of the sisters’, Nicky’s, funeral. 

We’re first dropped into the life of Lucky–the girl everyone wants or wants to be. A model whose pulchritude in tandem with her dangerous indifference pulls everyone into her orbit. Her life is nothing short of chaotic and stressful, and she has a knack for masking the lack of control she has over her life as an intentional impropriety. 

From our initial encounter with Lucky, much of the family’s dynamic locks into place. Lucky is the youngest, the wildchild, the sister closest in age to Nicky.

Then, there’s Avery, the eldest, the motherly, type A sister, the glue of the family. From Lucky’s POV alone, we realize that Avery takes the reins on family matters, much to Lucky’s annoyance. 

We then meet Bonnie, arguably the most hopeful and naive of the sisters, and much of the remaining family dynamic is explained. She’s the second oldest, closest in age to Avery. She respects authority and sees the best in everyone. As a character, she was probably the least fleshed out. 

And throughout the alternating character POVs, we learn about Nicky, the optimistic one. While each sister had a different relationship with Nicky, her personality shines brightly across every different memory of her. There’s a respectable amount of depth to Nicky, despite the fact that we, as readers, never know her. She’s never physically alive in this book, but it’s easy to feel that she is. 

The story follows the mundane aftermath of grief, while Avery desperately tries to prevent their mother from selling the apartment the girls grew up in. 

Avery thinly veils her grief and refusal to let go of the physical things that hold Nicky’s memories as mere legalities. She’s been paying for that house so the sisters could have a place to always call home, though it was no longer a home to anyone–the sisters all moved out on their own time, and the parents found a quaint home elsewhere. 

As the sisters gather in their childhood home to begin clearing out their belongings, there’s an explosion of everything that’s been left unsaid, both towards each other and to themselves. 

My Thoughts

Admittedly, it’s been a couple months since I read this book, so many of the initial thoughts I had are probably long gone. 

I fear I entered this book with expectations that were a bit too high. 

There is something very beautiful in the way these sisters care for each other. Bonnie helping Lucky sober up, Avery taking the brunt of her parents’ anger throughout her childhood so her sisters wouldn’t have to, Lucky allowing her sisters to care for her, allowing her sisters to feel nurturing and useful. It’s a beautiful depiction of all the ways we say ‘I love you’ without ever saying it. 

There’s also something very beautiful in the grief the sisters carry. Nicky is very much alive in the pages we read. We get the honor of feeling like we really know her because her sisters refuse to let her ever fully die. In the aftermath of her death, all of the sisters’ displays of love for each other are rooted in the love they can no longer express to Nicky. There’s anger, yes. There’s sadness, of course. And there’s resistance, obviously. But the most prevailing emotion of all is love. If there’s one thing we get to see with absolute clarity, it’s how the sisters transfuse their grief into love, both for Nicky and for each other. 

However, the characters fall victim to surface-level stereotypes that, unfortunately, block any opportunity for true depth.

Yes, stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Avery is the paradigm of a control-freak addict who, to an undiscerning eye, turned her life around, only to channel the foundations of her addiction into other things. 

Avery has a perfect life–a loving wife, a beautiful home, a stable, high-paying career. But underneath it all, she’s stuck. She’s still battling the self-destructive tendencies that led her to substance abuse originally. 

She cheats on her wife just to feel an ounce of control–but it’s not really control she’s chasing. She’s chasing chaos, she’s chasing disorder, she’s chasing destruction. She only feels in control when she’s rebuilding something, and now that her sisters are adults who claim responsibility for themselves, she’s left with only herself. She has to fall apart so she can piece herself together, because that’s when she feels useful. 

All of that is incredibly evident. And, yes, it is deep. But there was hardly anything else to Avery than that. To me, Avery had a personality, sure. But there really was nothing  more to her character than just being the oldest sister.

Sometimes, regardless of how much substance there is to a trope innately, when that trope isn’t done uniquely, it still feels a little weak.

Lucky falls victim to a similar kind of perfunctory categorization. 

There’s been a rise in literary fiction of the ‘cool, party girl’ trope: the girl that does too many drugs and has too much meaningless sex. The girl whose licentiousness is a  transparent shroud of her past trauma(s). She feeds into what people want from her, acting as if it’s her own intentional decision, because, when she does this, she’s not really in control of herself, but she can feel like she is. 

And that’s exactly who Lucky is. 

Like Avery, there’s really nothing more to Lucky than this. 

Lucky is the youngest sister. As the youngest sibling, I can relate to the loneliness Lucky feels, I can relate to how she feels like nothing more than a shadow in her sisters’ successes. I understand why she feels like she needs to be nothing like her sisters to feel like she can establish her own place in her family. 

But all of these things almost mean nothing when there’s nothing more to a character than just being a stereotype.

It just kind of feels like this book was an amalgamation of every trending character trope. When reading it, I often felt like Avery and Lucky weren’t really people, but just stereotypes the author wanted to incorporate. 

I loved Bonnie. Bonnie has effortless depth because, well, she’s not just an archetype. But Bonnie also seemed to have the least amount of care put into her storyline. 

She yearns for her boxing instructor for the majority of the book. In the end, they’re married and about to have a baby. Which is great! But it also seemed like a rushed, forced ending. I felt like she deserved more. 

And also, the ending. We need to talk about that.

The epilogue takes place ten years after the ending of the book.

Avery got divorced. She watches her ex-wife live the life Avery wasn’t able to give her. And that’s sort of nice. But also, if I were Avery’s ex-wife, I would hate her. 

Avery dangled a carrot in front of her for the entirety of their marriage, constantly leading her on and allowing her to believe that, one day, they’d have a child together, though Avery had no real intentions on ever following through. 

And then Lucky is sober for all of two months. Nothing drastically changes for Lucky, and that’s pretty disappointing. I guess Lucky’s story is supposed to be one that evolves past the pages, something that keeps going even after the last word.

But if we’re slapping last-minute endings together for everyone, shouldn’t Lucky at least get something happier? 

Final Thoughts

Blue Sisters is a book I probably won’t read again and probably won’t remember reading in a year. It’s pretty unremarkable. It has its moments, and the way Mellors expresses themes of love and grief is beautiful. But the lack of character depth and development held it back so much. 

I wasn’t obsessed with the writing style–it felt a little cringey at times–but I love how she so perfectly wields vocabulary. She uses the perfect words to describe things, and we love precision around here. 

The pacing was slow at times, but, as a lover of literary/realistic fiction, I have no issue with that. It was easy to become fully immersed in the characters’ lives. You feel what they’re feeling, you experience what they experience. 

I’d rate it a solid 3.5 stars. Again, it was remarkably fine. Or unremarkably great. It teeters the line.