Review of Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

*Blue Sisters* by Coco Mellors (2024). Published by Ballantine Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

Blue Sisters is one of the books I’ve been meaning to read for a hot minute. One time I went to the library, closer to when it came out, and was shocked to see it available in the new fiction section. I picked it up, but when I went to check it out at the scanner it gave me an error message. Turns out that it was on the shelves by mistake and I didn’t want to put my name on the holds list because of the pressure to finish it within three weeks.

Lo and behold, many months later, I found it again on the new fiction shelves. It definitely was not a new fiction book at that point, but I took it anyways. I read the book throughout the course of two nights on a weekend, as I was quite invested in this story—even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of the book itself.

Let’s get into the review!

After the death of their sister, the three Blue sisters come back to their New York City apartment and grapple with their pasts.

To start off this review, I could say I could see this book really being a television series. Each of the four sisters in the Blue family have their own entertaining, yet dramatic, stories that feed off of each other in a way that seems suited for television. I’ll be watching and waiting to see if my hunch becomes a reality somewhere down the line.

Anyways, this novel focuses on the Blue sisters, hence the title being named after them. Right now there are only three sisters, although, once upon a time, there was a fourth sister. The oldest sister is named Avery and she lives with her wife in London, but despite her success as a lawyer she has been a heroin addict and is currently trying to wean herself off of it.

Bonnie is a boxer who may or may not had a thing for her Slavic coach back in New York, but she recently quit her boxing career after she had a career ending defeat that was too humiliating for her to keep going. She fled with her tail between her legs and now works as a bouncer in a Los Angeles club.

The youngest sister is Lucky and she lives in Paris. She spends her days earning money as a model, but during the evenings, when she’s not booked, she goes way too hard into the party lifestyle. She concerns her other sisters with her habits, and, in this novel, she wants to try and start her life beyond the partying.

This novel takes a year after the death of the fourth sister: Nicky. No one saw the signs of what was happening to her until it was too late, and now each of the Blue sisters grapples with how she died, as well as how they need to figure out their shared past in terms of childhood trauma.

When their childhood home in New York City goes up for sale, that proves to be the driving force that brings all of the sisters back under the same roof again. For me, I felt like each of the sisters embodied an archetype/stereotype, which made them definitely feel like fictional characters in that sense, but you want to keep reading because they really do feel like sisters.

They hold up each other’s hair when they’re throwing up, and they don’t know what the secrets one another has buried deep. Some they do know, but others they keep tucked away inside of them—like many families and sisters, if we’re going to be honest. But as they go through something traumatic together, they’re going to learn how to excavate their grief and sorrow together.

Overall Thoughts

I briefly mentioned before that I thought each of the sisters felt a bit stereotypical, and that I didn’t care for. I tried to read Mellors’ other novel in the past, but I couldn’t get through that one. I think she’s a solid writer for sure, as she really makes these girls and their relationships come alive, but I don’t know if I personally care for her protagonists so far and am invested in them emotionally.

For me I thought the defining flaw in the novel was the sisters themselves. I also felt like this was a book I had read many times before, or even a television show I was familiar with, when it came to their individual stories. I wanted something more unique out of this novel and didn’t get that in the end.

I can see how someone else might love this book though, which is why I wouldn’t discourage others from reading it. That’s not how I do reviews. Taste is so incredibly subjective, and what might be my favorite novel could be something that bores you to tears. Neither of us are wrong for that in the end.

So go pick this up if you’re interested. I found it difficult to get through around the halfway point, but, like many works of literature, I don’t regret reading it.

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