One year after the tragic death of their sister Nicky, the three remaining Blue siblings, lawyer Avery, boxer Bonnie, and fashion model Lucky, find themselves severely adrift in their lives and careers. Forced by their mother to finally deal with cleaning out Nicky’s things from her apartment, they come together for the first time since the funeral, only for resentments old and new to surface. Raised by a distant, unloving mother and a drunkard father, the Blue sisters could be said to have trauma-bonded in their youth, but not without clear fracture lines. Avery, the oldest, was forced to be a second mother to her younger sisters, and as a result can’t stop herself from speaking down to them even as adults. Lucky, the baby, can be shockingly selfish and thoughtless, while Bonnie, in the middle, often finds herself playing peacemaker between Avery and Lucky.
Let’s stop to consider how unlikely it is that one family could produce a powerful corporate attorney, a world-class boxing champion, and a magazine cover model within one generation. Coco Mellors writes as though she’s only familiar with the concept of a job from seeing them in movies.
As demanded by the rules of contemporary fiction, each of the three Blues finds themselves at a crisis point. Avery, so committed to her role as the responsible one, has lately fallen apart in every way except falling off the wagon. Unable to handle telling her wife she didn’t want to have kids, Avery has begun self-sabotaging. It started with shoplifting from department stores, things she didn’t need and easily could’ve afforded anyway. But it’s progressed all the way to marital infidelity with a guy she met at her AA meeting. Bonnie stupidly got in the ring too soon after Nicky’s death and suffered a humiliating loss that also alienated her from the trainer she’s been harboring a crush on for years. As for Lucky, after years of hard-partying and abusing her body, she has started to realize that maybe she doesn’t have everything under control after all. Dropped by her team after a disastrous gig in Paris, she knows she doesn’t have it in her to be a model anymore, but has no idea what to do next.
Mellors’s idea of plot is just to have Avery and Lucky shout awful things at each other while Bonnie desperately tries to keep them from killing each other. She never bothers to really develop a character for the departed Nicky, nor does she spend much time at all on the siblings’ home life with their parents. She pulls the typical trick of withholding the mother until late in the story, and then having her have an entirely reasonable account for why she was the way she was which, of course, leads to more understanding from her daughters blah blah blah.
I felt my interest in Blue Sisters, both the novel and the actual characters, disintegrate as time went on. This is shabby, immature writing, the kind of thing that might lead to positive comments in a college writing workshop but should really be worked out of your system by the time you start writing novels for adults to read. The Blue Sisters just aren’t real people and their problems aren’t real either. It’s all smoke, no fire.