Blue Sisters (Coco Mellors) - DNF

I tried reading this book a few months back and after coaxing myself to reading about 150 pages, I gave up. Many readers seem to have enjoyed it and were deeply touched by it. As for me, I found it hollow, lacking depth, very cursory is character build up, plot or storyline.

The Blue Sisters is a story about four sisters, who struggle with their issues and help each other, mostly grudgingly. They are called Blue sisters because, wait for it, their surname is Blue. Nothing else than something as mundane as that. So these four Blue sisters - Avery, Bonnie, Lucky and Nicky (why would you spell Bonnie differently except because you could?) have different personalities and preferences and talents. Each of them is exceptional in her own field, these fields so vastly different that it boggles the mind. The eldest sister Avery is a Straight A's prodigal student and a brilliant lawyer who sailed through college. The second one is Bonnie, an outstanding wait for it, Boxer who was at the peak of her sporting career but couldn't carry through the promise due to personal tragedy and is now a Bouncer. Then there is Lucky who is the youngest and is a hugely successful and much sought after model in the international circuit. The third sister Lucky seems to be the only one who did not have a special skill or talent to have an extraordinary career and settles to be a humble teacher. She is plagued with reproductive health issues which need a hysterectomy to relieve her of pain she constantly suffers, but since she wants to be a mother to a biological child some day, she chooses chronic excruciating pain and eventually death. These sisters were brought up by dysfunctional parents who never abandoned them but yet never seemed to have given a loving home to them. 

The story is about how each sister deals with the trauma of Lucky's death due to medical carelessness and an overdose of painkillers. We get flashbacks of their childhood and the complex relationships they share with each other. They seem to be unable to express affection for each other, or share each other's grief though they are going through the same loss together. There is supposed to be an insane twist to the story at the end, but I could not force myself to read till the end.

The writing is very average with too much dialogue and very little character exploration. Each sister seems to be living on the edge in her own way. Three of the sisters being brilliant and hugely successful in varied and highly competitive fields - law, boxing and modeling, coming from an emotionally broken and dysfunctional family and a neglected childhood - seems to be an advertisement for the benefits of bad parenting. The fourth sister willing to suffer endlessly because she wants to be a biological mother at some point in her life - and finally dying because of this - I could not wrap my head around this. The good thing is bringing to the fore the often neglected condition of endometriosis and the associated pain that so many women go through, the medical neglect that many women face because their pain is dismissed, are aspects that this book brings to the fore.

This is a book written for being adapted to the screen - as a book it did not draw me in or hold me.