BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Blue Sisters (Coco Mellors, author)
Contemporary fiction, sisterhood, addiction, grief, death of a sibling, New York City, London, boxing, fashion modelling, AA, sobriety, parenthood.
In Coco Mellor’s contemporary fiction novel, Blue Sisters, three surviving sisters– Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky Blue-spent the year since the death of the fourth sister, Nicky, reeling with grief and imploding their respective lives. Blue Sisters is a study of grief, addiction and sisterhood. Nicky had suffered for years with misdiagnosed and excruciating endometriosis. After her allowed refills expired, Nicky obtained a deadly supply of Fentanyl-laced opioids and overdosed.
Each sister feels some responsibility for Nicky’s death. Poorly parented by an alcoholic father and an enabling mother, the sisters had been shepherded for years by the uber-responsible eldest, Avery. Avery, also an addict, has been sober for almost 10 years. Married and living in London, Avery is riddled with guilt because of her recent absence from Nicky’s life. Second in line, Bonnie, a professional boxer, refused Nicky’s request for pain meds, and hours later discovered Nicky dead at the family apartment. Youngest sister Lucky, closest in age to Nicky, was modelling and partying all over Europe during Nicky’s darkest days.
In the year after Nicky’s death, each of the sisters spirals. Their mother announces that she plans to sell the family apartment and the sisters come together in New York to dispense with Nicky’s belongings before the sale. Mellors writing nails the rhythm and tone of conversations between adult sisters. The three sisters provoke and push one another’s buttons, banter and interrupt, connect and disconnect with one another and return, again and again, with support and love as only sisters can. Their conversations are messy and overlapping and provocative and bossy and result in laughter and tears and arguments and forgiveness. Their love for one another is palpably deep and unconditional. In one stunning scene, the three surviving sisters, out and about in New York City, come upon an abandoned pink SMEG refrigerator. They decide it represents the goody two shoes sugary confection that was Nicky and they decide to rescue it, hauling it by hand over blocks and busy city streets to the apartment. When they arrive, they place it inside and it suddenly seems coffin-like.
Mellors also conveys the stark reality, the finality, and the irrevocable tear in one’s emotional universe that the sudden death of a sibling presents. Nicky’s death is the abrupt termination of her cottony candy dreams of love, marriage and motherhood. It is a sudden and complete cessation of her light and joy-filled unconditional adoration of her sisters. Death by overdose is an all too common tragedy. In Blue Sisters, addiction is understood as a disease, and is addressed without apology or self-justification. The author explores the intertwining tentacles of addiction and grief with real insight and gut-wrenching detail. She reaches deep into the belly and personhood of each character, wrenches free the anguish festering there and splashes it all over the pages of the book. It is ugly and sometimes overwhelming.
Lucky’s alcohol and drug use in Paris and around Europe feels organic to the meteoric and pressured world of high fashion and modeling. Through Avery, Mellors conveys the experience of recovery, one day at a time. Avery’s sobriety practice— her commitment to AA meetings, and her daily struggle to sustain her sobriety, feels authentic. Bonnie alone among the sisters avoids substance abuse, but arguably she does so by substituting her tunnel-vision, extreme discipline to training and boxing as an addiction of her own. Bonnie’s experience as the child of an alcoholic parent, and the toll on her self-esteem it caused, may well be the seed that renders her vulnerable to her infatuation with Pavel, the boxing trainer at the gym 15 years her senior. The relationship between 15-year old Bonnie and her 30 year-old trainer is cringe-worthy. Pavel’s interaction is questionable, though Mellors sugarcoats it by devising a story of restraint and long-withheld mutual love between Bonnie and her trainer. Bonnie’s self-discipline is the foil to her sisters’ impulse challenged battles with addiction, but Bonnie’s storyline is the most problematic.
The novel concludes on a up beat. Avery ultimately owns her decision not to become a parent, and returns to her sobriety journey. Lucky begins a sobriety journey of her own, lapses, and moves forward one day at a time. Bonnie returns to boxing and ultimately to training other boxers. The ending, though saccharine, is not spoiled here, but is perhaps too neatly wrapped. Nonetheless, the novel is a sparkling story of sisterhood and the power of the sibling bond.
Please support BookLife: Reviews for Readers and independent book sellers by purchasing Blue Sisters using the Bookshop.org link below.
