Overall, How To Kill Your Family is a fantastic read for anyone with a dark sense of humour and anyone who wants a crime thriller focused on the motive and carefully planning of the killings, instead of drawn-out descriptions of violence and gore.

Overall, this is very easy to read, it’s well written, I love the darkly wry style of the author who has acquired a new fan! 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.How To Kill Your Family follows Grace who is on a mission to get rid of the family who wronged her and take their fortune. He had even rejected her dying mother's pleas for him to support Grace, who at that point was a pre-teen, after her death. In an interview with Marie Claire magazine Bella Mackie said " This book is all about men having power over women and the system being rigged to make men win. SOME ADVICE: If reading a book entitled HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY deeply troubles you, close your eyes, hold your nose, snag this book. An aspect that makes this book really ironic (and funny) is that Grace is put into prison, which really starts to disrupt her serial killing plans, That’s the part in all of this that Grace doesn’t see coming, she’s arrested for murder!

Her victims are all the worst type of people and Mackie’s descriptions of their shallow lifestyles seem spot-on.it was trying too hard to come across as feminist - but then it also wasn’t very feminist at the same time? When an older man offers up an undeniably un-witty comment that’s clearly repeated regularly, Grace ‘idly wondered if he had a wife who’d dearly like me to dispose of him too’. She wants to make him suffer and wants him to know exactly who’s behind it and why before bumping him off too.

A diary format can sometimes work, when done well, but I really don't think that this was executed that well at all. Caught between the post-Christmas blues and the happy warmth of Trinity, the term can sometimes feel like an endless period of waiting and misery. A book that I have read recently and really wanted to share with you, perhaps to start adding to Christmas lists (did I really say that?If you’re a reader who needs characters to be nice, then this is not the book for you, because you’d struggle to find a single redeeming quality between the lot of them. Bella Mackie's novel is a blackly humorous, witty and wildly entertaining read that just might have you rooting for a serial killer!

To outsiders, its appeal remains rarefied, but dip into this shrewd, gossipy memoir and you’ll find an altogether different world, one of shameless wheeler-dealing, scurrilous cunning and blind luck. 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. This work by Karen Heenan-Davies, and/or BookTalk and Booker Talk blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4. It is difficult because I loved the concept and irony of her being imprisoned for the one murder she didn't commit yet this part of the plot fell very flat for me.

It’s about family, it’s about class and the patriarchy – structures and systems that Grace is subverting. The story started to drag from very early on, and I almost started to feel like reading this book was a chore. While not the most likeable of characters, Grace is still appealing and you do find yourself rooting for her, despite what she is doing. I delighted in how clever and well thought out each of her plots actually were and we, as readers, get to inhabit Grace's mind and follow along as she plans and executes (if you pardon the pun) these murders, anticipating the details of each murder as we go along. The story is narrated by Grace in journal form, as she is in prison for murder… except it’s the only one she didn’t commit.