How to Kill Your Family: THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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Grace Bernard is in Limehouse Prison serving a sentence for a crime she didn’t commit but that doesn’t mean to say she hasn’t committed some! Grace is not an angel, and this may sound terrible, but I really liked her and rooted for her the whole time. His willingness to punish a girl for not immediately embracing a photo of his dick, and I say that as someone who has killed five people.

I never fully comprehended Grace’s motives for adding ‘eliminate my entire family’ to her to-do list, nor did I grasp the full extent of the impact her father’s abandonment had on her or her mother, but feeling that I now know her intimately as a character, I can understand how she undertook and carried out such a task. How to Kill Your Family’ is less alarming than it sounds, but it’s still a darkly comic first-person narrative from the point of view of a young woman named Grace Bernard, who’s in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Grace is the result of a short lived but passionate affair her mother had with a very wealthy and very charming man who also happened to be very married. Speechify lets you listen to any text, including all books in the world with the best voices out there! Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from Karen Heenan-Davies and/or BookTalk and Booker Talk is strictly prohibited.

I don’t need to like characters but it helps to engage with them if there are some nuances to their personalities. Grace has been planning her outrageous plot since she was teenager, working her way through her own very bleak to do list…. I think it is also very effective that there is no dialogue or interaction between Grace and Harry in those final chapters, the ending is told through Harry's voice, reiterating the idea that in society men get to win and women don't get a say in it. Perhaps it is the master planner in me, but I wanted her to tick off all the items on her to-do list.

Grace is an intriguing character who at times, the reader can only admire for her gumption, drive and unapologetic cruelty. Yet, the endless tangents could have easily been summed up in one sentence rather than fifty-odd pages that Mackie takes to give you her opinion on something socially or culturally relevant. So Grace has benefited from a similar privileged life that she criticises other people for enjoying. By the end of the book, I understood that portraying Grace this way was intentional and that the most interesting parts of the plot depended on it but somewhere around the halfway mark I’d started to run out of patience with her. She talks about her inspiration for how she pitched the violence within the story and explained it was in response to the general misogyny of the coverage of crime.

Yet, the murders of Grace’s estranged family members are clumsly sandwiched in between these long rants. I’m more than 50% through my Goodreads goal for this year (you can follow me there too if you have Goodreads, same name as the blog), so I’m a little behind, but I expect to get caught up across the Autumn and Winter months with more time spent indoors!