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Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

Contemporary fiction

Blue Sisters

by Coco Mellors

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Quick take

Three sisters reunite to grieve their lost sibling in this gripping family saga that will have you in your feelings.

Melancholy

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Emotional

    Emotional

  • Illustrated icon, Multiple_Viewpoints

    Multiple viewpoints

  • Illustrated icon, LGBTQ_themes

    LGBTQ+ themes

  • Illustrated icon, Siblings

    Siblings

Synopsis

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they’ve been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Blue Sisters.

Blue Sisters

PROLOGUE

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. My mother is my best friend. My husband is my best friend. No. True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.

The eldest of the Blue sisters, their leader, is Avery. She was born wise and world-weary. At four years old, she returned to their parents’ Upper West Side apartment after walking herself home from kindergarten and declared herself too tired to go on. But she did go on, she always has. Avery taught all the sisters how to swim the front crawl, how to make friends with the bodega cats by tickling them under the chin, how to shuffle cards without bending the corners. She hates authority but loves structure. She has a photographic memory; in high school she broke into their school’s records and memorized her entire grade’s Social Security numbers, then spent the remainder of the semester freaking kids out by referring to them by their nine digits.

She graduated from high school at sixteen and completed undergrad at Columbia University in three years. Then, she ran away to join an “anarchic, nonhierarchical, consensus-driven community,” otherwise known as a commune, before briefly living on the streets of San Francisco, where she smoked and, eventually, shot heroin. Unbeknownst to anyone in her family, she checked herself into detox a year later and has stayed clean ever since. Afterward, she enrolled herself in law school, where she finally put that memory to good use.

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Why I love it

Every once in a while, a few pages into a new book, a thought strikes me: “This author has something to say.” This is always a magical feeling—one that brings a sense of certainty and excitement that what I am about to read will stay with me for a long, long time. Blue Sisters was one of those books. Right from the start, it’s easy to tell that Coco Mellors wrote this emotional saga with conviction—and boy, does she deliver on it.

Family is always complicated, and the Blue sisters have no lack of baggage. Avery, the oldest and always put-together, is hiding a past heroin addiction; Bonnie, the middle sister and former boxing prodigy, has receded into hiding in LA after a particularly devastating defeat; and Lucky, always the baby of the family, has endured a lifetime of abuse in the Parisian modeling industry. Nicky, the fourth sister, was the one thing holding them together—but her tragic death has left the sisters scattered and grieving. When the trio are brought back together under threat of losing their childhood NYC home, their reunion uncovers longstanding tensions—and forces them to reckon with the secrets they’ve kept from one another.

A tribute to sisterhood and female ambition, Blue Sisters left a deep emotional impact on me. I luxuriated over each pitch-perfect sentence and the sisters’ sharp characterizations. Pick Blue Sisters up this month. Though brimming with loss, it will give you a newfound optimism for humanity.

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