Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their sister's death in this poignant story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The Blue sisters are exceptional and couldn't be more different from one another. Avery, the eldest, a recovering heroin addict turned lawyer, lives with her wife in London. Bonnie, a former boxer, now works as a bouncer in Los Angeles after a crushing defeat. Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while escaping her wild lifestyle. After their sister Nicky's sudden death, Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky are left reeling. A year later, they must return to New York to prevent the sale of their childhood apartment.

Confronting their childhood disappointments and the loss of their sister, they discover their deepest secrets were hidden not from each other, but from themselves.

A beautiful story with really wonderful writing, demonstrating how grief affects everyone differently. While the story wasn't exactly what I expected, it still grabbed my attention and I found it really thought-provoking.

I did struggle with a couple of the characters in terms of their likeability, but I feel this is to be expected with stories like Blue Sisters.

Blue Sisters is a beautiful novel about three sisters who have lost their fourth sister, a year after the fact. Coco Mellors always writes books that are extremely hard to put away, I don't know how she does it, but I always read her books so quickly!
That being said, I did think that the characters in this book were very similar to the characters in Cleopatra & Frankenstein, so that disappointed me a little. I hope her future books will be a bit more distinct in that regard.

This was my first time reading a book from the author but I am delighted to say I thoroughly enjoyed the story and I look forward to reading more books from the writer in the future.

I liked Cleopatra and Frankenstein when I read it earlier this year, but I LOVED Blue Sisters. Complicated sibling dynamics, addiction and grief are all explored in this character driven narrative that kept me gripped from beginning to end.

Lucky, Bonnie and Avery are all navigating difficulties in relationships, careers and family in the wake of their sister, Nicky's death, as they come to terms with their own grief and what they want from a world without Nicky in it. Avery is a high-flying lawyer with a perfect marriage and idyllic life in London, but when her carefully constructed facade begins to crumble, she becomes tempted to tear it down herself. Bonnie was a successful boxer until she lost a fight following Nicky's death and escaped to LA, and returning to New York forces her to consider what she - and her heart - really wants. Lucky has been modelling since she was sixteen and is used to a life of partying and success, but when her nights and days begin to blur in an alcohol-induced haze, she has to question whether she's really in control of her lifestyle. Woven throughout a story filled with arguments, truces and deep-rooted love, is Nicky - the sister they lost, who connected to each of them in a way that is impossible to replicate.

When I opened up to the first pages of Blue Sisters, I thought to myself, “this couldn’t be as good as Cleopatra and Frankenstein”, a book I devoured last summer. Can the lightning of Coco Mellors’ golden pen strike twice? The answer is yes - I actually loved Blue Sisters even more than its darling predecessor.

BLUE SISTERS is the story of three sisters, Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky Blue, in the year following the tragic death of their sister Nicky. Mellors delicately traces the complexities of sisterhood, love and grief, creating a deeply gut-wrenching and layered tale with realistic characters and engaging moments. Put simply, it is full of depth and beautifully written. Mellors delightfully captures the spiralling, sweet and sour sense of both having, and being, a sister.

It is, ultimately, a story about addiction. Each of the sisters has struggled in one way or another with it. Oldest sister Avery is 10 years sober, whilst the youngest Blue, Lucky, is catapulting through life and has major drink & drug problems. This book is also about pain and loss, making it sound like it would be a hardship to get through. But it isn’t. Mellors wraps you up in the lives of the sisters and makes you care so much about them. You feel like you’ve become one of them yourself - a Blue. The sadness of the writing is peppered with warmth and humour. Dancing between London, LA, New York and Paris, I love how Mellors characterises these modern cities, her words and pages transporting you, a magic, papery portal. Her writing is so vivid, so rich, so moving. The last lines gave me chills, which is always my body’s way of telling me, “This was good. I like it here. Let’s stay for a while.”

I will read anything Coco Mellors writes. Eagerly awaiting her next book ! 💋 5⭐️

The Blue Sisters had a difficult childhood - their father was an alcoholic and their mother was distant. Living in a tiny flat in New York the sister’s relationship was often not easy but the bond was very strong.
As they hit their teens 3 of them escaped into modelling, boxing and a life in London, leaving the 3rd sister, Nicky, behind. When she dies suddenly they all take terrible life decisions to try to cope with their loss.
As they return to the flat to prepare it for sale can they help each other get to a better place?
Blue Sisters examines addiction in all it forms and isn’t an easy read in places. Many of the characters are awful, particularly Avery and Lucky, and very difficult to relate to. However, it is well written and well paced, I certainly wanted to know how their lives would pan out. The ending feels right and not neatly ended, life isn’t like that.

Another beautifully written story from Coco Mellers.
The death of one of their sisters affects the remaining three sisters in completely different ways. Individual and different, the sister’s childhood was overshadowed by the moods of their alcoholic father and distant mother but they were there for each other, as adults they became distant, each with their own issues. The characters are all complex but relatable.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read Blue Sisters

The Blue sisters have always had each other. Avery the oldest struggled with addiction but has gotten her life together, became a lawyer got married. Bonnie became a very successful boxer and won a world title. Avery, the youngest became a model young and has since struggled with abusing substances so readily available in her world. Then we have Nick, a school teacher struggling with managing pain that comes with her endometriosis. One year ago Nicky died after accidentally overdosing on painkillers, and her death sent the rest of her sisters into a tailspin, not to mention their mother is ready to sell the apartment they all grew up in. They reunite where they rediscover how much stronger they are when they are a unit again.

This book was so heartbreaking. It deals very indepthly with grief, addiction, heartbreak, and family relationships. It was a beautiful exploration of sisterhood. The author is very gifted at making you realte and feel for very very flawed characters.

This book follows sisters Avery, Bonnie and Lucky one year after the death of their sister Nicky.

There were many elements of this book that I thoroughly enjoyed, the most notable being the writing quality! Like Mellor’s first book Cleopatra & Frankenstein, this book was beautifully written and the language helped you to sympathise with and feel the emotions of the characters. I appreciated that each sister had their own distinct story and personality. Out of the three sisters Bonnie was by far my favourite character and I loved her story and her character arc! I also liked how we learnt more about Nicky and her situation as we went through the book.

However, I found Avery (and to some extent Lucky) deeply, deeply unlikable. At times I struggled to get through the book due to how awful they were. I felt like Avery in particular could have done with having at least one solid redeeming characteristic to help you get behind her. Additionally, I don’t think I was fully able to grasp the relationship between the sisters and their parents, particularly between them and their dad. I think I’d have appreciated a little more information there.

While I did enjoy this book, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed and it wasn’t quite what I expected. Given the subject matter, I was expecting a slightly more emotional read than I think this ended up being. I was conflicted with what to rate this (between a 3.5 and 4 stars) but ultimately decided on a 4 stars due to the writing quality.

This book has a very similar tone to Cleopatra & Frankenstein, but I would say with even less likeable characters (and I know the characters in C&F weren’t exactly likeable either, but I found those characters more charming and easier to read). Overall, not quite what I expected by I’m still glad I read this.

Thank you very much to 4th Estate and NetGalley for the ARC!

Coco Mellors’ writing breathes fresh life into the narration, making the novel both engaging and thought-provoking. “Blue Sisters” is not just a tale of sisterhood and familial bonds but also a reflection on personal growth and the strength found in connections.
One of the standout aspects of the book is the authenticity of the sisterly bond. The relationship between all of the four sisters is portrayed with all its complexities—love, rivalry, misunderstandings, and unbreakable loyalty. Mellors skillfully navigates their individual and shared journeys, making their struggles and triumphs feel deeply personal and relatable.
This book is a poignant and immersive read that stayed with me long after I turned the last page. Coco Mellors has crafted a beautiful tribute to the power of sisterhood and the resilience of the human spirit. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a deeply moving and well-written story.

Many thanks to Netgalley and 4th Estate and William Collins for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I couldn't put this book down!
The writing in this book was stellar, and although the chapters were long, I did not mind them. The dynamic between the sisters and how their lives unfolded was so well done! It's my absolute favorite read of the year!

An exploration of grief, trauma and addiction that celebrates the power of finding yourself and being true to who you are. Brilliantly brought to life flawed characters who implode their lives in order to build them back, together. A stunner!

Blue Sisters follows the lives of three sisters - Avery, Bonnie and Lucky- one year after the death of their sister Nicky.
The novel drew me in from the beginning, I love family dramas and was intrigued by the sister’s childhood and dysfunctional parents. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a sister and I found some chapters more interesting than others. I found Bonnie’s chapters the least interesting and Avery’s the most compelling. I didn’t particularly warm to any of the characters and for me the writing didn’t always flow seamlessly. However, overall it’s a well written and insightful novel about grief, love and relationships.
3.5 stars
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.

The Plot: 3.5/5 The Characters: 4/5 The Setting: 4/5 The Writing: 5/5

Thoughts:

Thank you 4th Estate & NetGalley for this advanced readers copy! 🤗🤗

Happy Release day to Blue Sisters!! 🩵

The epilogue was a bitesized insight to Coco Mellors writing for me, and WOW I was impressed.
Avery, Bonnie & Lucky are processing the death of their sister Nicky, and you are read through each sister’s narrative per chapter.

Mellors writing really allows the reader to understand the characters and does a great job of taking you around with them. This is a heartfelt and sensitive story about grief, addition and sibling dynamics.

I really enjoyed this read!

Tropes:

Sisterhood
Grief
Family Drama
Addiction

Pros & Cons:

Pros: pretty cover, incredible writing.

Cons: loooong chapters 🐌

I have found a new favourite!!! If you have sisters this book will hit you extra hard 😭❤️‍🩹

"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?"

I am a huge fan of Coco Mellors! There was no doubt that I would love this book too. "Blue Sisters" made me cry and laugh, put me in a crisis, and healed me.

This book is raw yet beautifully captures grief, addictions, and the different coping mechanisms we use to deal with the pain. Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky try to navigate the grief and loss of their sister Nicky's death. They all cope in different ways in different cities. They have been hurting and self-sabotaging for a year when they get an email from their mother telling them she is selling their childhood home (the place where Nicky was living when she died).

I love, love, love Coco's style of writing! The way she uses vivid analogies to describe not only the setting but also the emotions. These characters are not perfect (except Bonnie, in my opinion) and have their faults, but I loved every aspect of them. I understood them at their self-sabotaging times and loved them on their getting-better journey.

"Blue Sisters" is a little hard to review for me. I have a younger sister, and this book made me question what I'd do without her. It's safe to say that this book made me cry a LOT. Being an older sister myself, I connected to Avery a lot. There are so many things elder sisters go through that other people can't see, and reading about Avery made me feel seen.

This is less about grief and more about different addictions, mostly drugs. Watching all of the sisters ruin their own lives in different ways could be interesting if the book managed to make me care.
This is a book trying to humanise privileged young women and showing that you can be rich and successful and also be depressed, as if this wasn’t obvious.
A little detail that irritated me was that it was mentioned that Bonnie found Nicky 4 minutes after she died. How could she know the exact time though? That doesn’t make sense. There are more details that annoyed me like some slight biphobia that made me not enjoy this book for the most part.
And around 60% I actually started to enjoy it to some extent when the characters reached peak self destruction and I actually got interested in how it will turn out.

With similar themes of addiction and mental health to her first novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Blue Sisters follows the lives of – you guessed it – the three remaining Blue sisters as they navigate their very different lives in the year since their fourth sister, Nicky, passed away. With the sisters feeling a quarter each to become ‘whole’, it is no surprise the death of Nicky leaves a gaping chasm in their family dynamic and mental psyches. Each sister, so glaringly different to the others, copes with their grief throughout the course of the novel.

As always, Mellor is a master of characterisation. The wide variety of characters are well-fleshed and, most importantly, realistic. Nobody is perfect and their mistakes and failures make them all the more interesting. Across the novel, the alternating points of views add to the characters stories and each journey is interesting and heart breaking.

I thoroughly enjoyed Blue Sisters and the way it portrayed grief across each of the sisters in similar yet marginally different ways. I recommend this to anyone who loved Mellors first novel - this one definitely maintains the hype!

Thank you 4th estate and Netgalley for the ARC!

<b><i>”As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found”</i></b>

With <b>Blue Sisters</b> Coco Mellors tells us the journey of three entitled and privilege girls through grief.
It is a testament to Coco’s writing that I still loved the book, despite not being able to relate to the characters for one single bit. Even so, I can appreciate how well the bonds of sisterhood between the sisters were described, and how heavy themes such as addiction were handled with care.

This was a beautifully written and engaging family drama, and I’ll certainly going to come back for more of Coco’s writing.

<i>I would like to 4th Estate | Fourth Estate and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this eARC in exchange for an honest an honest review.</i>

P.S – A huge appreciation to all authors writing about Endometriosis. Let’s not normalize pain.

After reading, and loving, Coco Mellors debut book, ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’, last year, ‘Blue Sisters’ was by far one of my most anticipated releases for 2024, and, oh, it did not disappoint.

This book is such an intimate look into sisterhood, grief, addiction, and love. How messy things can become, but how strong those threads of love are, even when everything is falling apart.

We meet our main characters, Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky, one year on from their sister Nicky’s accidental death. They’re all reeling in their own ways - the loss of their sister has knocked them all off balance. After her funeral they had all fled back to their different parts of the world, but due to an array of different circumstances, and their parents wanting to finally sell the family apartment where Nicky had been living up until her untimely death, the sisters find themselves together once more, and having to navigate how to be with each other, without Nicky, while coming to terms with the fallout effect it’s had in their own individual lives.

This book is so incredibly tender. It’s dealing with harsh topics, but doing it with such care, while not shying away from what it’s like to struggle with addiction, the pain of loss, and the way our childhood shapes us (for better or worse).

The very first page of this book explains how a sister is not a friend, saying that comparing the two is like comparing the intertwined strings of a friendship bracelet to the complex biological twirl of an umbilical cord, and I thought that was such a perfect analogy for sisterhood. It isn’t a prettily made thing - but it is strong, and keeps us tied together regardless, throughout the good times and the bad.

We see this throughout the book - the love the sisters have for each other not exempting them from falling out, from saying harsh truths, lashing out, and hurting each other. But they’re still there for each other at the end of the day, and that’s what’s truly important.

This book moved me to tears several times, and after reading the epilogue I just sat with those tears for a while. I believe Mellors has reached what she set out to achieve with this book. It is a beautiful testament to sisterhood.

Go lightly.

Thank you to the publishers, and Netgalley, for the copy to review.

Coco Mellors completely nails the sister dynamics, telling the story of four sisters and their bonds from shared childhood challenges to adult grief. There's nothing quite like loving and losing a sister, and Mellors does a beautiful job of describing the year after one of the sister's dies and all its tragic ramifications for the remaining three.

A very compelling read, complicated characters and touching dynamics.