Coco Mellors second novel focuses on the lives of three sisters who return to their family apartment in New York following the news that their mother is going to sell it. I have often enjoyed books about siblings returning to where they grew up, often to deal with ageing parents and having to get over their differences. And it’s a bit like this with Blue Sisters.
First there’s Avery, the eldest, a lawyer now living in London with her wife Chiti, a picture of success; then Bonnie, a world-class champion boxer who has abandoned boxing to work as a bouncer for a night-club in L.A.; and Lucky, the youngest, a fashion model based in Paris with a substance-abuse problem.
The family is still reeling from the tragedy of their sister’s death a year ago. The fourth sister, Nicky, who was the nice one, the school teacher everyone loved, who yearned for a family of her own. Nicky’s story also involves dependency on painkillers, which she takes to deal with her crippling endometriosis.
The story is narrated by each of the three sisters in turn, and we get the backstory and how they eventually make their way to New York, each of them running away from something. I found Avery, under pressure from Chiti to start a family, less interesting until suddenly she wasn’t. The fashion world of top models is revealed warts and all and it suddenly isn’t surprising that Lucky is an addict. But I found Bonnie’s story and that of the disciplined world of boxing particularly interesting.
Woven through it all is the theme of addiction, different kinds of addiction and its ability to ruin families. And because Chiti is a therapist, you get quite a lot of therapy too. Sometimes I found this invaded the story a little too much. There’s also a lot of guilt. While Avery isn’t blaming her mother for her poor parenting, for not leaving her drunk of a husband, she’s feeling guilty for not helping Nicky, for not seeing her struggles, a guilt shared by her sisters. We don’t meet the girls’ mother until the end of the book, but she was really interesting too, and I wouldn’t have minded seeing a bit more of her.
Growing up, she and her sisters had everything they needed, but not what they wanted, which was space. Too close for comfort. A cliché, but it was true. They were too close to be comfortable in that home. There was one bathroom for all six of them; Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons, she always thought, but Avery measured hers in the hours she spent waiting for that bathroom to be free. At the time, she’d hated it; she and her sisters felt like lobsters packed into a murky tank, each of them jostling and bumping up against the other to reach the light above the water. All through her adolescence she longed to leave, but she stayed living in that home until Bonnie started training, Nicky went to college, and Lucky began traveling as a model. Once her sisters were all safely out, she allowed herself to flee.
The Blue Sisters is a very readable, engaging story with several great settings – including Hampstead and New York – and three well-drawn narrative voices. It’s an easy read, even if it does deal with difficult themes, and the way the sisters relate to each other, disagree, fight and come back to each other seems very real. A good read if not a great one – three and a half stars from me.
