Book review: Blue Sisters is everything the title suggests: a gritty tale about three women whose surname describes the state of their troubled lives. But there’s more than melancholy at work in Coco Mellors’ new novel. The US-based writer has followed up her Sunday Times-bestselling debut about an impulsive marriage, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, with another exploration of love, loss and conflict – this time among millennial siblings.
The eldest Blue sister is 32-year-old Avery, a recovered addict and corporate lawyer who is inexplicably unhappy with her comfortable London life and marriage to soulmate Chiti.
Middle sister and one-time champion boxer Bonnie, missing the stabilising presence of her mentor and ex-trainer, Pavel, is working as a bouncer in a seedy Los Angeles nightclub.
And Lucky, the beautiful 20-something baby of the family, has a (clearly familial) drug and alcohol problem that’s about to derail her international modelling career.
Underlying the angst is the absence of the siblings’ beloved fourth sister, Nicky. The novel opens on the first anniversary of Nicky’s death from an accidental drug overdose; the sisters, still struggling with grief, have no idea how to mark the occasion.
They then receive a curt email from their mother announcing her plans to sell the New York apartment of their childhood, the same apartment in which their sister died. “If you would like to collect any of Nicky’s things,” their mother writes, “please do so by the end of the month.” “It’s cold,” Bonnie says to an enraged Avery. “Even for her.”
But the stage is set for catharsis – and Mellors’ novel delivers. Blue Sisters takes the reader on a no-holds-barred unravelling of the family’s dysfunction, moving through each sister’s viewpoint in alternating chapters.
Avery, unable to support her wife’s wish to become a mother, sabotages the marriage by having an affair. Bonnie, meanwhile, moves back to the New York apartment to deal with her troubling memories of Nicky, as well as her former boxing life with Pavel. Lucky, after some disastrous partying in Paris and London, joins Bonnie in New York for urgent help with detoxing. And then a shamefaced Avery also arrives, setting the scene for the trio’s inevitable showdown.
If the synopsis sounds dramatic it may be no accident: Mellors’ first novel is currently under option with Warner Bros for development as a television series. But Blue Sisters is undeniably cinematic.
The action moves at pace through the leafy streets, seedy bars and boxing gyms of Hampstead Heath, the Marais and Manhattan. Dialogue is slick and – despite the tough subject matter – often funny. “Living in LA is like dating a beautiful person who has nothing to say,” one sister quips.
But when emotions run high, the prose can too: crestfallen faces are “like flowers with all their petals picked off”; pain is “like crashing waves, gathering momentum and receding, her insides the beaten and unyielding shore”. Even the characters notice things getting a bit formulaic. “Are you getting all last-act-of-a-sports-movie on me?” Lucky says to Bonnie in a pivotal moment in the New York apartment. “I can do the locker room pep talk, too, you know.”
A sister is not a friend, this novel’s prologue asserts: the relationship is primal and complex, one in which “you’re part of each other, right from the start”. It’s an interesting idea that Blue Sisters fails to fully explore. Instead, the heroines’ efforts to stay afloat take centre stage and inevitably – as eldest sister Avery explains – meaning becomes an afterthought.
“Things happen and we have to learn to live with them,” Avery says. “If we can find meaning in them, fine, but even if we can’t, we still have to live with them.”
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (HarperCollins, $37.99) is out now.
