How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
How To Kill Your Family
Author: Bella Mackie
Genre: Contemporary / Thriller
Date: 15 October 2021
Rating: 4 stars
Review: What an absolutely twisted read! I loved every page and every word of this dark and juicy book filled with snarky comments. Grace Bernard ranks as one of my favourite anti-heroines. When I say that I want more female villains in my books and movies, this is exactly what I mean.
How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie is the story of Grace Bernard. When Grace learns the truth about her father’s refusal to acknowledge her as his daughter and the callous way in which he brushed aside her mother’s pleas for help, leaving them to languish in poverty while he reaped the benefits of being extremely rich, she makes a vow. A vow to basically kill him and the rest of his family, nothing much. Credit where credit is due, she manages to do just that slowly but meticulously killing off people from her father’s immediate family. But just as her father’s paranoia is at its peak, Grace gets arrested for a murder she did not commit. The irony! Now, rotting in jail with an annoying roommate Grace is writing a diary that recounts every murder and the steps she took to commit them.
With the release of the Season 3 of You this month, we are once again coming to terms with the sheer pleasure we get from watching a psychopath shamelessly do the things we imagine doing ourselves. I guess, each of us is just waiting for that one push off the ledge to go ahead and do all the wicked things that civil society stops us from doing. And watching, or reading about, someone doing those things has its own kind of dark joy. We have time and time again been introduced to such male characters. The arrogance, the intelligence, the ability to plot out every detail of a masterplan. God, is it refreshing to watch a woman absorb all those talents and take them further!
Grace is unafraid to use the sexist misconceptions of the society to her benefit. She unabashedly uses the way her rich victims mistreat people to turn the tables on them. She would have totally gotten away with the whole thing if not for the twist in fate that led her to jail. But that’s not even the twist in the story. The real twist is unexpected. It is the kind that makes you giggle in a way you would expect a villain in an animated show to do when he sees his evil plan coming to fruition. The only way to describe the feeling is that there’s a ball in your stomach that bubbles with a mix of glee and dread. You are rooting for the main character despite her reprehensible actions but you also love it when she is defeated by someone objectively much worse/
The writing in the book has ‘laugh out loud’ moments but it is constantly so funny that you cannot stop grinning. The jokes, or actually the way the punchline lands, reminded me of a series I remember reading in my teens called ‘Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs’ by Molly Harper because it has the same unexpected kick to it. When a character ready to commit murder points out the things wrong in society you really see them in a different light and that’s true for this book.
I truly enjoyed this book which makes me a little worried about my own mental health. But what’s not to enjoy about a little psychopathic streak in your personality?