Breakaway Books

Authored by Coco Mellors; Published May 2024; Fiction

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When I was little, all I wanted was a sister. Plagued instead with brothers, it seemed to me that a sister would make me feel much less alone in the world. Blue Sisters proves and disproves my theory, showing both the perils and joys of sisterhood.

Blue Sisters is the story of three adult sisters who have lost their fourth sister, Nicky, to a drug overdose the previous year. The remaining sisters—Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky—deal with infidelity, addiction, and a sense of aimlessness as they struggle with the one year anniversary of their sister’s death. These sisters fight exactly as you would expect sisters to—it’s fierce, and they know exactly what blow will hurt the most. But the novel shows just how difficult it is to break the bonds of sisterhood once and for all.

This novel is about grief, but it’s rarely directly addressed. All the sisters dance around it, expressing it in differing, sometimes infuriating, ways. Blue Sisters is also (duh) about sisterhood, and, in contrast, the sister dynamic is a constant topic of conversation. What does it mean to be the oldest? The baby? Of course, the sisters fill hyper-stereotypical roles, but they’re stereotypes for a reason. The specter of their (negligent?) parents hangs over the book, but in only one chapter does their mother actually show up—not  quite as villainous as I expected. Despite not having a sense of how sisterhood really feels, the whole novel felt true, a surprisingly accurate depiction of how painful and enriching the relationship can actually be, and the destruction that grief wreaks.

Addiction takes up a good chunk of this novel—again, each sister encounters it differently, but each face of addiction showed me something different. There was something refreshing about its realism, about how addiction can push women into dangerous and uncomfortable situations, about how difficult it is to escape. Despite the fact that each sister reaches incredibly different stations in life, addiction touches them all. It’s a warning, more than anything else.

Blue Sisters seems like it should be depressing for all its realism, but I was shocked to find that the bonds of sisterhood it depicted left me feeling warm more than anything else. If you want to remember your love for your sisters, or bathe in your own longing for them, pick this one up.