I’m not too sure how I feel about this family drama story.

Three successful middle-class sisters, once close, split into destructive paths following the death of their sister, Nikki Blue. A year later, they receive an email from their mother telling them to come and look at Nikki’s thing because their family home in New York is to be sold.

The story is split into each sister’s point of view, how they grapple with the loss and the changed dynamic of their once close-knit family. The eldest Avery has been the glue keeping the sisters together in the absence of adequate parenting from their mother and alcoholic father.  She herself is a recovering addict, made good as a lawyer, married to a woman in England. Next is Bonnie, world champion boxer, then Nikki who is a teacher and the youngest, is Lucky an international supermodel.

There is a lot of telling rather than showing as we learn in intricate detail their background stories as individuals as well as their relationships with others and each other.

Besides grief, loss and love, themes of addiction in families is explored well as is the health issues surrounding endometriosis. Underlying it all is the question of what it is to be a sister and a mother. There is no real plot as such as the reader is taken on a journey with each sister’s reckoning of their grief and their exploration of the new family dynamic.

Families can be complicated and the Blue family is certainly that. I didn’t particularly warm to any of the characters, their grief or their behaviour, bad or otherwise. But I did want to see them succeed and the story arc for each character although predictable is what drove me to keep reading.

This slow-paced novel was well written but I was distracted by the constant interiority, sometimes repetitive and detailed anecdotes some of which did little to enhance understanding of character or place. It slowed the pace and struggled to hold my interest.

However, I did find the relationship between the sisters to be tender and heart-warming at times. The scene with Bonnie helping Lucky was particularly well handled giving a detailed insight into addiction.

The last quarter of the novel was more satisfactory as we were given insights into each sibling, their conflict and resolution. It’s  not a novel I loved but it was okay.

I’ve read most of Sally Rooney’s books and I think Intermezzo is her best so far.

However it may not be everyone’s taste as the paragraphs are long and meander and quotation marks aren’t used for dialogue which can be off putting. But if you persist, then you may just be as surprised as I was with this delightful novel about grief, loss and love.

The novel is centred around three main characters, two of whom are brothers, Ivan and Peter who have just lost their father. Theirs is a complicated relationship made more difficult by a ten year age gap and a divorced and remote mother. The third main character is Margaret, separated from her alcoholic husband who falls for twenty-two year old Ivan, a star chess player. Peter on the other hand as the older brother has his own issues as he navigates the loss of his father all while dealing with the love of two women.

It sounds like a complicated web of relationships and it is. What makes it so compelling is the characters. I stopped reading this one halfway through for two weeks while I was away and went back into not missing a beat as I was so invested in each character. Rooney is skilled at making you care enough to hope for each of them. It’s tender-hearted and beautifully written.

I really enjoyed this one. Give it a go.