TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager says her September Read With Jenna pick, “Blue Sisters” by Coco Mellors, is a modern-day “Little Women.”
“I grew up with a mother and grandmother who read ‘Little Women’ to me, which is about a strong group of sisters. Not since then has a book about sisterhood stuck with me as much as Coco Mellors’ ‘Blue Sisters,’” Jenna says.
The Blue sisters — Avery, Bonnie, Nicky and Lucky — all grew up in Manhattan, but by adulthood, Avery has left for London, Bonnie has gone to Los Angeles and Lucky is in Paris.
When Nicky unexpectedly dies, the three estranged sisters return to New York and are forced to confront much more than the sale of their childhood home. They come up against the lasting effects of their grief, their family’s cycle of addiction and more.
“Like ‘Little Women,’ home is always when the sisters were unified and together. I loved these characters who span continents and yet their DNA and the history of their childhood is like a compass that brings them back when they need it most,” Jenna says.
Mellors also made the connection between her second book, a followup to the best-selling "Cleopatra & Frankenstein," and the Louisa May Alcott classic.
“In my mind, ‘Blue Sisters’ is a modern day ‘Little Women’ meets ‘The Royal Tenenbaums,’” Mellors tells TODAY.com.
“Blue Sisters” by Coco Mellors
“It’s about three incredibly different sisters living in one family — a lawyer in London, a boxer in LA and a model in Paris — who are navigating life in the wake of their fourth sister’s death,” Mellors says.
“It’s really only by returning home and returning to each other that they can move forward like through this grief, and also sort of fall back in love with both their family, their sisterhood and their own individual lives,” she continues.
Mellors, who was born in London and moved to New York City when she was a teenager, says she wrote the entirety of “Blue Sisters” while living in Los Angeles.
“I was interested in writing sisters that are exceptionally different within one family. The lawyer, the boxer, the model — these are careers I’ve never had, and they’re character types that don’t totally align with my own,” she says. “Part of the fun was imagining that.”
“What I did have was the four cities in the book — London, New York, LA and Paris — which are the four cities that have defined me as a person and make me who I am,” she explains.
While some details came from her own experiences, she says through laughter she did not source any material from her full sister or her two half siblings when writing “Blue Sisters.”
The names of the sisters in the book came intuitively during her writing process, Mellors says. She used the names to "underline some of the central themes of the book."
"They're such a clan, these four sisters. They're a girl gang, even though they’re obviously fighting and disarming,” she says. “I really liked that all of their names rhymed — they all chime together. They have that same ending. But I also deliberately had Nicky have her full name be Nicole, so she’s actually the one sister that’s slightly different.”
Like her characters, Mellors travels between worlds frequently. Soon after she finished “Blue Sisters,” Mellors says she went to Paris for a few weeks, then returned to New York, where she now resides with her husband and child.
“The truth is, like, this is an American novel, and it’s really a New York novel at its core,” she says. “And as much as I am British, I’ve lived in America for 20 years now, and it’s the country that I chose, as opposed to the country that I was born into.”
The book was released earlier this year in the U.K., and published in the U.S. on Sept. 3.
“For me, it coming out (in the U.S.) is, in my heart, it’s the most exciting launch that can happen,” she says with a grin.
The timing of finding out she would become the September Read With Jenna author was “crazy,” Mellors says, as she was still in the hospital after her son arrived two months early via a C-section.
“I went into hospital with stomachache, and then within 12 hours, I had an emergency C-section. He was healthy, but he was premature, so we stayed in the NICU with him for two months,” she says. “I gave birth on Saturday, and I found out about Read With Jenna on Monday. I was still in the hospital.”
“My agent was like, so sorry to bother, I know you’re in the middle of things... I was like, literally still on an IV. She was like, ‘I have some great news, which is that you have been chosen!’ And I was like, ‘Yay!’ and my husband was like, ‘Don’t move! Your blood pressure!’” she recalls through laughter. “I was delighted, but it also it came a little bit in the wake of some even bigger news in my life, which is that my son was born. That is how I found out, and I just couldn’t have been more excited.”
Since the U.K. launch of “Blue Sisters,” Mellors says she loves hearing which of the four sisters readers feel most aligned with — and that she hopes the themes of the novel will help spark conversations about harder topics as it is released in the U.S.
“I hope it opens up like a more destigmatized dialogue around addiction, and also around chronic pain,” she says.
