Blue Sisters is a story about four sisters, which made me think of a book I read last year, Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful. I liked Hello Beautiful, but I was not completely sold on the sisterly relationships portrayed in that novel, so I was kind of on the fence about reading Blue Sisters; however, Blue Sisters has a lot of glowing reviews online, so that convinced me to read it. I am going to be straight with you: I do not like Blue Sisters.

Blue Sisters is set one year after the unexpected death of Nicky Blue. The three surviving Blue sisters, Avery, Bonnie and Lucky, have scattered around the world and each is working on destroying her own life when they get an email from their unloving mother, who tells them that the family’s apartment in New York is going to be sold, and if they want any of Nicky’s stuff, clear it out now. Avery, the eldest sister, is angry that their mother and father are selling the family home and wants to put a stop to it. Avery, Bonnie and Lucky all end up reuniting in New York, where they must reckon with the loss of Nicky, and reckon with their relationships with each other.

Blue Sisters is a character driven novel. There really is not much in the way of plot because the novel heavily relies on flashbacks to explain how the sisters ended up where they are in the present. Mellors has created some richly detailed characters in Avery, Bonnie and Lucky, but she does not give that same detail to supporting characters, even Nicky, whose death is the cornerstone of the plot. Nevertheless, whether a main character or a supporting character, all the characters have one thing in common: unoriginality.

Avery, as the eldest, is the mothering sister, the control freak, the one who thinks she must micromanage everything and everyone. She is a successful corporate lawyer who lives in London and supports everyone else financially. Bonnie is the placid middle child who is always caught in the middle of Avery and Lucky’s squabbles. She is a successful competitive boxer who is secretly in love with her coach. Lucky is the youngest sister, the beautiful, spoiled child who has been working as a model since she was fifteen. She loves to party hard and doesn’t really want to do anything about her addictions. The reader doesn’t really get to know Nicky beyond her being the one everyone loved.

The unoriginal characters are not my problem with Blue Sisters, though. I like character driven stories, even if the characters are clichés. My problem with Blue Sisters is that, as someone who has three sisters, I do not find the relationship between the Blue sisters to be authentic. I am going to have to lightly spoil part of the novel to explain why: Nicky had endometriosis and was in a lot of pain. She was told the only way to relieve the pain permanently was to have a hysterectomy, but she did not want to have one because she wanted to have kids one day. Instead, Nicky became addicted to pain killers and died of an overdose. Avery, Bonnie and Lucky all knew that there was something wrong with Nicky, but none of them did anything about it. My sisters and I are not as close as Mellors purports the Blue sisters to be, but there is no way that any of us would just bury our head in the sand if there was something wrong with one of us. We would try to help each other, we would want to help each other, so why didn’t any of Avery, Bonnie and Lucky want to help Nicky? Avery, Bonnie and Lucky feel bad for their lack of action in preventing Nicky’s death, but then they tell each other, oh nothing we would have done would have stopped Nicky’s death anyways. That’s not the point! The point is that you should try! Even if you know you are probably not going to succeed in making a difference.

Does Coco Mellors really expect us to feel sorry for these characters, beyond the loss of their sister? She paints this portrait of three women who have had a hard upbringing, but the Blue sisters are white, they grew up in Manhattan and went to private school even though their parents were poor. A lot of us grew up with unempathetic parents, and a lot of us have an alcoholic parent or two, but we still know right from wrong, so Avery, Bonnie and Lucky only have themselves to blame for cheating on a spouse, beating the crap out of a stranger or breaking recovery to go on a drug-infused bender. Yes, privileged people have problems and deserve some empathy, but privileged people should also be cognizant of their privilege, and that doesn’t happen in Blue Sisters. It is a novel about self-indulgent women, and I just cannot relate to them at all.