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

Product Information

From prison she regales us with her story, and what a story it is. Filled with dark humor, snark (my fave!), and the juicy details of her life along with the creative offing of six members of her family, she had me laughing out loud. Kudos to the author for writing such an engaging villain. The moment a teenage Grace discovers her millionaire, playboy dad rejected her and her dying mother’s pleas for help, Grace has dreamt of revenge. She wants to make him suffer and wants him to know exactly who’s behind it and why before bumping him off too. Firstly, the murder she supposedly committed isn’t interesting enough to have made her as famous as she and her prison mate keep going on about. Secondly, the murders she does commit are done in such an incredibly dull way. Yes, some of them are more clever than others and there is definitely some meticulous planning involved at points – but I never really cared when one of the characters died and I felt very underwhelmed when suddenly they were dead. How To Kill Your Family is a dark, sometimes brutal, delight of a novel that had me giggling one moment and cringing the next. This is not a cozy story, but there is PLENTY of dark humor and snark, which I adore. Grace is not an angel, and this may sound terrible, but I really liked her and rooted for her the whole time. Grace has been planning her outrageous plot since she was teenager, working her way through her own very bleak to do list….

There's no two ways about it, Grace, the protagonist of this story isn't a nice person. And yet, I still found myself really liking her as a character. She is brutally honest, incredibly vengeful and darkly comical and we as the reader get front row seats to her innermost thoughts and feelings told through her life story written while serving time in prison for a crime she, ironically, didn't actually commit. I thought the premise was fantastic and I really enjoyed reading as Grace executed her cunning plans as well as her musings on all manner of subjects including wealth, class and even influencers. The narrative is generally really sharp and clever although at times Grace's story is interrupted by the present day so at times I could understand why people found this to be a bit of a ramble. I didn't actually mind this as it felt more realistic for me personally. After all, whose thoughts are ever organised? One thing is when you expect something from a book and then you realize that's not going to happen, another story is when the book is also outrageously bad. I thought from the opening couple of chapters that I was about to be proved wrong. How to Kill Your Family had a strong narrative voice and some amusingly cynical comments about the empty lives of rich people. But it went downhill rapidly. Surprisingly, even though I was privy to all of the grisly details of Grace's horrific crimes, I never stopped rooting for her.

Book Review

We meet Grace in prison. But as rings true throughout the novel as a whole, she is there for reasons we later discover are far more complicated than would be contained in a straightforward murder – arrest – imprisonment plot.

Our narrator Grace has been hard done by, there is no ifs nor buts about that. Which means it’s easy to support her actions, even though she’s killing seniors and teenagers alike. You’re not cheering her on per se, but your moral compass has shifted because, Grace has had a hard life for no real reason about from inconsideration from those around her. Also, it’s easy to like Grace because she’s confident with sarcastic quips and often is saying what we’re thinking but are too reserved to say ourselves. There is a twist towards the end. It’s a twist I didn’t see coming, yet, it fit, it made sense, I loved the irony. 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. Despite it all, I was very entertained and thoroughly enjoyed the audiobook. When a voice can confidently convey attitude and inflection of numerous characters, you know that you’re in for a treat.There’s no real drama. No point at which she is almost caught in the act which would have come as a welcome intermission. A funny, compulsive read about family dysfunction and the media’s obsession with murder’ SUNDAY TIMES STYLE Grace is clearly intelligent for example— she comes up with ingenious ways to kill her relatives without leaving any trail. Yet she completely misreads the character of her cell-mate in prison. She is scathing about wealthy people with their expensive tastes in clothing, wine, and houses yet after her mother’s death she was raised by a high-income couple who taught her to enjoy the finer things in life. So Grace has benefited from a similar privileged life that she criticises other people for enjoying.