Blue Sisters Review

 Although I have not read very many good reviews about the debut novel of Coco Mellors ‘Cleopatra and Frankie’, I still decided to read ‘Blue Sisters’ as I liked the topic and the concept. This follows three sisters-Avery, Bonnie and Lucky as they all grapple with the sudden loss of their sister a year prior. They all receive an email from their mother that their family flat is being sold and they need to go back and go through their deceased sister’s things before they are thrown away.

I expected so much from this story. Even though I don’t have sisters, I was always fascinated by how well (or in this case not really well) these sibling relationships are presented in fiction as they are such an important part of so many people’s lives. Unfortunately, I found ‘Blue Sisters’ attempt to tackle so much that what this ended up being was an incredibly superficial and surface level discussion on grief, sibling relationship, addiction in many forms, adultery etc. Each sister has something happening for her, and they are distinguished enough from each other that they do read like individual characters. But their characterization is overly simplified and they are reduced to one or two characteristics with their arc being telegraphed in from the start. Nothing they have done excited me too much, as the author kept telling us how they felt instead of in any way showing it to us through their actions.

In fact, that was my biggest issue with this book-the writing itself. The style was so full of cliches that at times, it read like a fan fiction piece instead of an actual professionally published book. The dialogue felt wooden and not like something these people would actually say, but rather contrivances for further exposition. Some of the dialogue belonged in that I’m 14 and this is deep subreddit. The sentence characters say and the way the author describes people, events and even provide characters’ thoughts have nothing original or even interesting to say about anything it claims to tackle, which are all quite important and ever present in the contemporary world.

Because of this superficiality of the narrative, the conflicts never truly felt like they got a satisfying ending. Instead, the sisters don’t even talk out any of the deep seeded and deep rooted trauma they all have. It is just assumed they are now somehow alright, although fundamentally nothing much has changed. Just like the narrative, their changes also felt surface level. It felt like just as we were about to get somewhere with these characters, see them properly grow and understand themselves thus allowing them to heal from the grief, the book ended. At the end, I was left wondering what was the point of all of that? The book certainly did not send a message that trauma can’t be healed or that people can’t be changed, but why go through all of that discussion without an ending? Yes, I know there is a prologue at the end, but that big of a time jump just felt jarring to me.

At the end, I didn’t connect to any of the sisters in the novel. They felt like an amalgamation of all the tropes of young women in fiction we have seen so far, with close to nothing original in either of them. Their relationships felt unnatural and we never really got to actually see them do much together except argue and occasionally eat bagels (they are in NY after all). All of their relationships have already been built and the author did not do enough to show me who they were before we were introduced to them at the start of this novel. The constant ‘this is how this character feels because this’ was taking me out of the narrative and was at times annoying. Mellors felt the need to over explain, instead of letting the characters show us how they were feeling.

At the end, I did have high expectations for this book, but it truly disappointed me. I gave it ⅖.