fayf 's review for:

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
5.0
emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
  • This book was absolutely so well done! The characters felt so real and so did their emotions (specifically the grief surrounding their sister’s death)
  • The depiction of addiction and the struggle that comes with it was also really well done! It was interesting to see how it can manifest in different people and how grief can impact it.
  • The relationship and bond that the sisters had was so perfect. The ups and downs that they went through and how their relationship changed/grew over the span of the book was so great to read. 
  • The growth of each character (not only the development of them as characters in the book) as they work through their grief to become who they are in the end was very well done. Each of them had to work through their grief to get to a place where they could live their lives again. 

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? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. My mother is my best friend. My husband is my best friend. No. True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.

But what they don’t know is this: As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.

She was home, the only one she knew, not because she’d always lived in it, but because it always lived in her.

“She was…very precious,” he said eventually. “She was more than that,” said Bonnie. “She was—” But there was no word for what Nicky had been. “Everything,” she settled on.

“Once you get to my age, you will learn that you can take a lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.”

Before she ever knew a lover’s body, she knew her sisters’, could see herself in their long feet and light eyes, their sleek limbs and curled ears. And, before life became big and difficult, there were moments with them when it was simply good: an early morning, still dark out, their parents asleep. Her younger sisters arriving one by one at her bedside, hair tangled, exuding their sour and sweet morning musk. She’d lifted the covers for each of them, letting them crowd into her bottom bunk, bodies pressed tight against one another, and they’d fallen asleep again like that, dropping off like puppies curled around a mother’s warm belly. She’d slept, too, safe in the center of her sisters, not knowing or needing to know where she ended and the next began. Squeezed beside Bonnie and Lucky now, it was superfluous to describe what she felt for them as love. They were love, beautiful and unbearable and hers.

“I miss her and I miss her and I miss her,” she began. “And I wait for the feeling to end because every other feeling has ended, no matter how intense, no matter how hard—but this won’t. There’s just no end to the missing. There was life before and there’s life now. And I can’t seem to accept it. I can’t accept that I’ll have to miss her forever. There will never be relief. There will never be a reunion. And I wish I had a God. I wish I believed in an afterlife or something, anything. But when I try to talk to her in my head, there’s no response. I can’t hear her. And I can’t feel her. All I have is this missing. And part of me is glad it won’t end because it’s all I have to connect me to her now.”