I grew up with a brother – one smelly, ravenous, monosyllabic-grunting brother – so I like to romanticize what it might have been like if I’d been enveloped in sisterhood.
Coco Mellors' novel, “Blue Sisters,” now out in paperback, bursts that bubble right away with the warning that “a sister is not a friend.”
And yet, she tells us, sisters “are a part of each other, right from the start.”
The novel opens as Avery, Bonnie and Lucky are observing the one-year anniversary of the death of their sensitive sister, Nicky. Each surviving sister has spent the ensuing year stuck in addiction, a crumbling marriage or a career that has gone wildly off course.
Each sister also bears the scars of an upbringing in which their charismatic, alcoholic father constantly claimed the attention their mother might have lavished on them.
Novels rarely make me cry but the way Mellors ended this novel opened up the spigot.
— Kerri Miller, MPR News
