Ask a Bookseller: ‘Blue Sisters’ by Coco Mellors

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.Part of the superpower of stories is to create spaces for empathy: Between the pages of the book, we get to step into the lives of other people, real or fictional. That’s what Stefanie Chow of Stillwater Books in West Warwick, R.I., loves about Coco Mellors’ novel “Blue Sisters.” “It's a very messy story,” Chow says, “but it’s really rooted in this unconditional love between sisters, and it just at one point they felt like flesh and bone to me.” The topics of the novel are heavy indeed, since the Blue sisters of the title come with their share of addiction and unhealthy coping mechanisms. The oldest sister, Avery, is a recovering heroin addict turned high-powered lawyer living in London. Middle sister Bonnie is a former world champion boxer who left the profession after a difficult loss. The baby of the family, Lucky, is an LA-based model stuck in a cycle of partying, drinking, and drugs. The novel begins one year after their fourth sister, Nicky, has passed away unexpectedly. Stefanie Chow describes what she liked about this book: The story is basically these three sisters finding their way back to each other, but in order to do that, they really have to confront their pain. And one thing that I really loved about the book is that it’s written with this attention to detail that just makes the characters feel so real. It's a very vulnerable story. Every chapter is told from a different sister’s point of view. As they start to see the pain that their sisters are dealing with, they have this empathy and this pain at the same time that just makes everything so much harder. There were times when they were really cruel to each other. Sometimes they came off as unlikable, but the fact that they find a way to forgive each other really won me back over as a reader. — Stefanie Chow