I bought How to Kill Your Family earlier this year after seeing it everywhere at the beginning of the year. I’d heard it was similar to My Sister The Serial Killer which I’ve also picked up recently, so I thought it would be a good easy read between some lengthier books on my TBR.
How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
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I have killed several people (some brutally, others calmly) and yet I currently languish in jail for a murder I did not commit.
When I think about what I actually did, I feel somewhat sad that nobody will ever know about the complex operation that I undertook. Getting away with it is highly preferable, of course, but perhaps when I’m long gone, someone will open an old safe and find this confession. The public would reel. After all, almost nobody else in the world can possibly understand how someone, by the tender age of 28, can have calmly killed six members of her family. And then happily got on with the rest of her life, never to regret a thing.
When Grace Bernard discovers her absentee millionaire father has rejected her dying mother’s pleas for help, she vows revenge, and sets about to kill every member of his family. Readers have a front row seat as Grace picks off the family one by one – and the result is as and gruesome as it is entertaining in this wickedly dark romp about class, family, love… and murder.
But then Grace is imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit.
Grace Bernard is a person who is so fully filled with hate towards anything and anyone, that her descent into becoming a killer isn’t a shock even if you hadn’t read the title. Whilst her hate is, for a better word, productively targeted towards her biological father and his family, Grace also despises everyone around her – even the family and best friend that took her in gets heavily judged by our main character.
Whilst the story is almost narcissistically focused on Grace, we mostly see other characters with her views laced on top of them. However her father and his family are egregicoulsy dislikable (or at least most of them are) and by the end of the story, this comes down to an almost nature vs nurture debate. Whilst Grace has never been in contact/brought up by her family and some of her other family members have purposely distanced themselves from the family – there’s a strong sense that they still share similar tendencies of being bad people which is interesting to read.
Obviously the main character is a serial killer, and the point is that you’re meant to dislike both her and the victims because that’s why she’s killing. However, I do know some readers do need a person to root for, and How to Kill Your Family doesn’t have this, and it’s very much like a journal/ramble from our main character instead. I didn’t mind this, but I know others will.
The style of this book is Grace is writing her “true” memoirs whilst in prison for the murder she didn’t commit, about the murders she actually did. So for a lot of the book we get the to the point of the planning an exection… pun intended. But for the other parts of the books, Grace is clearly going a bit stir crazy in prison and it rambles onto tangents that just don’t add much to the story.
The book borders on contemporary, with a little hint of thriller. However I would classify it as mostly a contemporary read, mostly based on the humour and set up of the story. Contemporary readers will likely be able to pick up and enjoy this more than thriller readers, mostly as there’s not a huge amount of tension about the murders throughout.
The ending of the book is fairly anticlimactic, and brings in another character as shock value without it really paying off. It reads a little bit like a cliff-hanger in that you kinda wanna google what the hell just happened, but for a book that is almost definitely not going to have enough a sequel. So overall it feels a bit disapointing.
I had a point about the consistency of the books story, but it does lead into spoilers territory so click next tab only if you want to!
One of the key irks I’ve had with both what is said within the book and in the marketing is that Grace Bernard has murdered six people. And whilst her initial plan was to murder 6 people OR if you include the murder she’s in falsely in prison for then it does add up to 6, but by the end of the book she’d still only killed Five. I don’t know if I’m just misremembering the count or it’s poor writing (I can pass of the marketing as a non-spoiler thing) but either way it really got to me at the end of the book.
Overall, I enjoyed reading How To Kill Your Family as a break between big fantasy epics but it’s not a book you need to think about too much, and I probably wouldn’t pick it up again.
Positives of How To Kill Your Family
- Dark and funny contemporary read
- Fast read with journal style writing
Negatives of How To Kill Your Family
- Characters are hugely dislike-able and you don’t have a person to root for
- Anticlimactic ending
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