A review by jrayereads
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

4.0

 
I was a big fan of Cleopatra and Frankenstein because I often love messy, insufferable characters whose lives are the kind of thing I would never want to experience but that I would love to hear someone else dish about over some chips and salsa and margs. Like a Normal Gossip episode in book form. That being said, Blue Sisters is just as dramatic but had an extra layer of depth with discussions of grief and addiction that I genuinely liked. This one, with its more limited cast and scope, felt more focused and less scattered than C&F did. I know a lot of people don’t like Coco Mellors’ prose, but I think it’s effective in the types of stories she’s telling. I think it’s flowery enough to be immersive but not to the point where it impacts the flow of the scene. One of this book’s biggest strengths is its pacing. Mellors excellently weaves flashbacks and memories in with the present and she builds great tension through where she ended off each chapter to swap to the next sister’s POV. I was invested enough in the lives of each sister (mostly Bonnie, tbh) and I needed to know how things would end.

This isn’t the author's fault but WOW I was not a fan of the audiobook narrator. I swapped back and forth between reading with my ears and my eyeballs and I would definitely recommend reading a physical/ebook copy rather than listening to it, if that’s an option for you. Her delivery was so dry and the accents were painfully inconsistent. 

If not for the treatment of one of the characters in this book being so awful, this could have been a 5 star read. I hated everything about how this character was handled. Spoilers below. 

Okay, so Avery, the eldest sister, is a lesbian character who cheats on her wife with a man after reluctantly telling her wife they can start trying for a baby. She is supposed to be this high-strung, extremely organized character who suddenly, out of nowhere, destroys her life by cheating on what seems to be a whim. I’m sure the cheating was supposed to be another form that her addictive personality takes, and it seemed to be framed as an escalation of her more “acceptable” coping mechanisms of secretly smoking cigarettes/stealing designer stuff, but to me it came out of nowhere. I get what Mellors is going for, but I hated it. It’s possible to write messy lesbian characters without their messiness manifesting in sleeping with men.That element of representing a lesbian character felt mishandled to me.

 It’s also possible to write conflict in romantic relationships WITHOUT USING CHEATING!!!!! 

And, let it be known, I would’ve been just as bothered if Avery cheated with a woman. Grief is not an excuse to be a piece of shit. I have lost a sibling, and my grief has never driven me to cheat on my partner. The moment a character cheats on their loving partner, I personally lose all sympathy for them and ability to connect with them. It is my absolute biggest pet peeve in any media and it typically ruins things for me. And then Avery, who is supposedly the intelligent one, leaves the Plan B wrapper in the trash in her house, where her wife FINDS IT? Like, did her brain fly out her skull alongside her morals? Even though the resulting fight was satisfying, mostly because Chiti responded in a completely justified manner, I hated it with a burning passion. 

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and I think it was an improvement on Cleopatra and Frankenstein, but I can’t give it 5 stars. I acknowledge that this is mostly a me thing and it will not bother most people because (UNFORTUNATELY) cheating happens all the time and it’s just a fact of some people’s life, and that’s fine. But for me, cheating is usually a deal breaker for me fully liking a piece of media.