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    How to Kill Your Family
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    How to Kill Your Family
    Unavailable
    How to Kill Your Family
    Ebook417 pages8 hours

    How to Kill Your Family

    By Bella Mackie

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

    ‘I loved this book’ RICHARD OSMAN

    ‘Funny, sharp, dark and twisted’ JOJO MOYES

    ‘Chilling, but also laugh-out-loud funny. Another corker’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

    They say you can’t choose your family. But you can kill them.

    Meet Grace Bernard.
    Daughter, sister, serial killer…
    Grace has lost everything.
    And she will stop at nothing to get revenge.

    –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-

    ‘Funny and furious and strangely uplifting. Grace is a bitter and beguiling anti-hero with a keen eye for social analysis – even in her most grisly deeds, you never stop rooting for her’ PANDORA SYKES

    ‘Deliciously addictive…brilliantly executed’ i PAPER

    ‘Addictive… Grace Bernard is one of the most intriguing and bewitching protagonists I've read in years’ EMMA GANNON

    ‘A funny, compulsive read about family dysfunction and the media’s obsession with murder’ SUNDAY TIMES STYLE

    ‘You’ll be gripped… Grace’s emotional detachment throughout will give you chills’ Rated 5 stars by COSMOPOLITAN
    ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

    ‘Hilarious and dark’ ELLE

    ‘Ironic twists and caustic commentary on everything from liberal guilt to the consumerist con that is “selfcare” sharpen this debut novel’ OBSERVER

    ‘Brilliantly tongue-in-cheek stuff from the Vogue columnist’ IRISH INDEPENDENT

    ‘Witty, waspish satire of a murderer with no regrets’ GRAZIA

    ‘Original, funny, unique and such a refreshing read’ PRIMA

    ‘A deliciously dark debut novel’ RED

    ‘One very entertaining read’ WOMAN’S WAY

    How To Kill Your Family was number 1 in the Sunday Times paperback chart on 26/04/2022

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJul 22, 2021
    ISBN9780008365929
    Unavailable
    How to Kill Your Family
    Author

    Bella Mackie

    Bella Mackie’s debut novel How to Kill Your Family was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller and spent 47 weeks in the top 10 in paperback. She is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling nonfiction Jog On, and has written for the Guardian, Vogue and Vice. In 2023 she judged the Women’s Prize for Fiction and her work has been shortlisted for the British Book Awards.

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    Reviews for How to Kill Your Family

    3.5/5

    167 ratings7 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      so intriguing, and completely unexpected ending.
    • 3/5
      2.5*
      The ending saved it. I liked the tone and pace of the ending, but what is it with "oh, I'm rambling"? Author, you were rambling for 400 pages?! The chapters have no structure, one minute you are in Spain, the next in prison, the next in London and Spain again.
      There is no timeframe or there is something that resembles it but it is so messed up.
      The murders are very well defined, but having them intertwined in a havoc of writing is bad.
    • 5/5
      Grace is in jail for a murder she did not commit and locked in her cell she relates the stories of the murders which she did commit. These murders just happen to be that of her close family against whom she embarked on a mission of terrible revenge. Although Bella Mackie’s plot isn’t terribly origina, it is told with a dark and vicious style that is absolutely compulsive. In Grace, the author had come up with a character that is appalling detached and darkly hilarious, who commits the most terrible of deeds but you still find yourself rooting for her. Mackie’s writing is furious, witty, droll, and full of wonderfully observed detail and a viciously keen eye for biting social satire. It also ends up with a deliciously ironic and laugh out loud postscript that adds another layer of spice to an already twisted tale.
    • 2/5
      Funny but not convincing. I don’t believe for one moment that Grace would write out her crimes while in prison. Therefore the ending - clever though it is - does not work. Somehow, despite the dark nature of the crimes, this isn’t even chilling; the humour neutralises any shock.
    • 4/5
      I might not want anti-heroine Grâce as a friend, but I did enjoy her judgemental, snippy comments about everything from the Bored Rich to Manicured Influencers, as she does away with the family she never knew.

      I could have done with shorter chapters, they always make for a speedier read, but it was fun to enter vicariously into the different worlds of each of her victims. And the twist was great.
    • 3/5
      Best for:
      People who like a real good revenge story, but also something a little different.

      In a nutshell:
      Bella Mackie is picking off her family, one by one. The twist? Most of them don’t even know she’s related to them.

      Worth quoting:
      “Tell me if the person I’ve fallen in love with seems like a monster. List the ways. Do a deep dive into it, make graphs. I want all the information.”

      “The only thing worse than someone who enthusiastically devours all pop culture and spews it up ... is someone who takes pride in not understanding new trends. You’re not better than that. You don’t get points for deliberately trying to avoid learning about what’s happening around you.”

      Why I chose it:
      I’ve seen it a few times in bookshops and finally decided to pick it up.

      Review:
      The book drew me in from the first page, because it starts unexpectedly. I’m going to gloss over that part and provide a bit about the high-level plot and discuss the narrator Grace. Grace is the one who is killing her ‘family.’ Her dad cheated on his wife with her mother, and then denied Grace’s existence while Grace and her mother Marie lived in a studio.

      Grace is pissed about it, and I get that. So she spend time planning to basically wipe out the family. Which is made a bit easier because her dad is very well-known, and thus his family is easy to track.

      Grace is not a good person. She doesn’t pretend to be, and she knows that killing a bunch of people puts her on the wrong side of moral. But she’s also a bit insufferable, which makes it both easy to root for her to try to right some wrongs, but also makes it easy to remember that, um, killing is also super wrong. Grace is the worst kind of judgmental - she thinks pretty much everyone is less intelligent than her, and really any choice any person could make is ripe for the mocking. Not outwardly - she’s very good at blending into the scenery when she wants to. But her inner monologue is snarky and her social commentary at times feels a bit like someone trying to sound cool on Reddit.

      The book itself is well-written - I kept reading it and wanting to read it, and had to force myself not to pick it up before bed last night because I knew I’d just stay up too late reading it. As it was, I finished it in three days, and one of those days I was working.

      Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
      Donate it (I don’t tend to keep fiction books around, but I hope whoever picks this up at the free library at my Tube station enjoys it as much as I did)
    • 3/5
      “You never see a nice calm person with a Bichon Frise. It’s always permanently discontented middle-aged women who communicate their disappointments through the dog. ‘Betty can’t sit here, it’s too hot and she’s getting anxious.’ Betty is fine. You, on the other hand, might want to contact a therapist.”

      I had high hopes, but I was disappointed. I have no problem with flawed, sarcastic protagonists, who are designed to be hated. In fact I often enjoy hating some characters. I appreciated Grace’s darkly humorous and evil side, although the way she killed her uncle was unnecessary – not because I disagreed with the killing, but because nobody should witness a family member in a sexual setting. Barf.

      This book had a good start but quickly became tedious. It was just far too long and often dull. Whilst Grace had an understandable hatred for some of her family (other members really were quite innocent), she had a strong hatred for almost everyone and everything. Even her best friend/almost brother/almost love interest only held a microscopic element of respect in her eyes.

      The ending. Oh the ending. WTF? It was long and I so wanted it to be over. Some authors provide a random twist ending that completely up-ends the whole story and leaves you questioning everything. This one just made me ask, what was the point?