Book Review: How To Kill Your Family, Bella Mackie
Image courtesy of Charlotte Moyle
Rating ★★★★★
In Summary
Genre: Fiction
Publication date: 22/07/2021
Number of pages: 368
Keywords: dark humour, satire, murder, revenge
Content warnings: contains descriptions of murder, sex acts and references to suicide
Format: Hardback, e-book, audiobook
The Review: Am I rooting for a murderer?
The anti-hero is a protagonist of a novel who is the opposite of the traditional main character hero generally found in fiction. Generally lacking morality, courage, or breaking as many laws as they can. Anti-heroes are characters we shouldn’t be rooting for but the right authors can make us question our own morality.
Bella Mackie introduces us to the latest anti-hero: Grace Bernard; a woman who delights in telling the reader that although she’s currently falsely imprisoned for murder, she has in fact killed six members of her family and is getting away with it.
Grace’s goal in life is simple: destroy the life of the millionaire who rejected her and her mother, leaving them to live a life of poverty in a tiny studio flat while he and his official family live it up in their, as she puts it, “McMansion”. On taking down the family she would reveal herself as his remaining heir, inheriting the millions for herself.
From her prison cell in Limehouse she describes each of the six deaths, writing down the gruesome details in a notebook with the mindset of someone who is certain she is getting away with it. Grace is eloquent and well educated, writing with confidence as she describes scouting out sex clubs, manipulating people, and the demise of her kin. She reminds me of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair who also pulls herself from poverty, leaning on the comfort offered by well off friends, and manipulating people to get what she wants, and of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, as she enjoys taking control and letting her victims know exactly why she is doing this.
Grace is a terrible person: she’s arrogant and single-minded, she exploits people and is a snob despite her poor upbringing. There are times when I didn’t like her at all (for example when she deals with her innocent cousin) and there are times when I agreed with her observations (not to the point where murder would be acceptable but there’s certainly people in the book who needed to be given a reality check!) This is all credit to Mackie’s writing, as her characterisation and observations are on point throughout the book.
There are some killer lines and observations, including a savage takedown of millionaire instagram influencers and the people who follow them and a line I found myself laughing out loud to as she snobbishly describes her mother’s friend. Mackie brings a bit of herself into Grace: Grace goes on long runs in order to calm her thoughts, a reference to Mackie’s first book “Jog On: How Running Saved Her Life”, although we hope Mackie doesn’t have the same murderous intentions as her leading lady.
How To Kill Your Family is a fantastic read for anyone who loves dark humour. It’s fun to find yourself anticipating the details of the next murder as she goes through them all and I found myself delighting in how clever she was when planning each one. By the end I was rooting for her to not just get out of jail for the one murder she didn’t commit but to fulfill her plan despite how awful she is.
The round-up:
Quote:
“Helene was kind, but she was hardly a great intellect, and had a fairly basic level of insight. Her favourite shows were all on ITV, if that makes it at all clearer.”
Read if: You enjoy black humour or being on the side of a murderer.
Similar books: “American Psycho”, “Killing Eve”, Black Mirror
Last impressions: Bella Mackie’s first novel is outstanding and I loved reading a novel with a woman as the anti-hero. The characters are so well written and I can relate to a lot of the people in the book; her observations and satire are on point and I would highly recommend this to any fiction lover. It’s easy to pick up, although not for the faint-hearted at times. I hope there’s another one to follow this picking up where this book ends, as the ending did leave me a bit frustrated and wanting to know what happens next to Grace.
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Written By Louise Mortimer
