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A review by booksandabackpack
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Blue Sisters is the story of 3 sisters arriving at the one year anniversary of the fourth sister’s death. While the characters were developed as well as the plot, this book was a big miss for me.
Every character was harshly distinct from one another with fantastic jobs and unique traits that felt tremendously cliche to me. A family of four sisters all so wildly different from one another felt so forced and like a box was ticked. It wasn’t just with their careers but their sexuality, fashion, living situation, and everything in between. All the side characters were forced into this distinction as well, with their unique identifiers being pushed to the forefront. This completely took me out of the story and felt like a checked off list more than a naturally diverse fictional world. I took multiple notes throughout when a new bauble of a character would appear because it just baffled me.
While the hodge podge variety of characters took me out of the story, what turned me against it was the treatment of addiction and the power within an age gap relationship. Addiction was clearly a struggle within this family yet it doesn’t tie together demonstrably. The best way I can say it is, icky. Although I’m not looking for a fiction book to promote a healthy way of handling a disease like addiction, this one read too flippant and discombobulated to appreciate it.
The last quarter was so much stronger than the first half or so but the epilogue was such a disappointment.
What Mellors did masterfully though was make each of the characters clearly alive on the page, even if they were weighed down by cliches. I’d like to read from her again in a story where the characters aren’t forced to fill out every possibly diverse aspect of a human being.
Every character was harshly distinct from one another with fantastic jobs and unique traits that felt tremendously cliche to me. A family of four sisters all so wildly different from one another felt so forced and like a box was ticked. It wasn’t just with their careers but their sexuality, fashion, living situation, and everything in between. All the side characters were forced into this distinction as well, with their unique identifiers being pushed to the forefront. This completely took me out of the story and felt like a checked off list more than a naturally diverse fictional world. I took multiple notes throughout when a new bauble of a character would appear because it just baffled me.
While the hodge podge variety of characters took me out of the story, what turned me against it was the treatment of addiction and the power within an age gap relationship. Addiction was clearly a struggle within this family yet it doesn’t tie together demonstrably. The best way I can say it is, icky. Although I’m not looking for a fiction book to promote a healthy way of handling a disease like addiction, this one read too flippant and discombobulated to appreciate it.
The last quarter was so much stronger than the first half or so but the epilogue was such a disappointment.
What Mellors did masterfully though was make each of the characters clearly alive on the page, even if they were weighed down by cliches. I’d like to read from her again in a story where the characters aren’t forced to fill out every possibly diverse aspect of a human being.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Drug use, Infertility, Infidelity, Sexual content, and Alcohol
Moderate: Death