Fynh liest reviewed Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
Thoughtful and emotional
5 stars
A slow-paced, but still absorbing novel.
It focusses heavily on the relationships of the three eponymous Blue sisters: the one between each other, those to their late sister Nicky, those to their parents and those to the people each of them is close to.
Nicky's unexpected death tore a hole in their lives but also in their relationship as sisters, and the reader follows each of them as they avoide having to deal with their grief. Their escapism also reflects in their personal struggles in life and in their relationship to others, and while the avoidance itself is something they have in common, the way they do it could not be more different.
The author makes strong use of streams of consciousness as a narrative device as the sisters think about their current lives and seamlessly make connections to past experiences, only to then draw conclusions for …
A slow-paced, but still absorbing novel.
It focusses heavily on the relationships of the three eponymous Blue sisters: the one between each other, those to their late sister Nicky, those to their parents and those to the people each of them is close to.
Nicky's unexpected death tore a hole in their lives but also in their relationship as sisters, and the reader follows each of them as they avoide having to deal with their grief. Their escapism also reflects in their personal struggles in life and in their relationship to others, and while the avoidance itself is something they have in common, the way they do it could not be more different.
The author makes strong use of streams of consciousness as a narrative device as the sisters think about their current lives and seamlessly make connections to past experiences, only to then draw conclusions for the present again. Sometimes, this makes it hard to keep track of the timeline we are currently in, but this, together with the author's general writing style, works so well to build the characters and make the reader feel for them. As an example, I started missing Nicky myself, even though she is dead right from the start of the book.
But even though the book was hard to read at times, due to the sad topic of loss and grief it's dealing with and the many interpersonal conflicts, it also contains a lot of hope and heartwarming interactions between the sisters.