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

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Addictive… Grace Bernard is one of the most intriguing and bewitching protagonists I've read in years’ EMMA GANNON

Ironically, Grace was in jail for a murder she did not commit, yet she was never charged for the multiple murders that she did commit. 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. 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! To relieve the boredom and the inane chatter of cell mate Kelly she decides to write her astonishing story. This tell all explains exactly what she is guilty of! This is a novel about rejection and betrayal, revenge and retribution. 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.The idea is promising, Grace is a likeable character and the first chapters really hook you, even if you don't understand everything. But from there on is just a bunch of facts of her life after another, casual things that happened to her, the only two people still in her life and that horrible cellmate she unfortunately has. Early on in the book, Grace declares unfazed that she has killed six members of her family, yet she is in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. Then, she proceeds to write about all her murders, her motives and goes into exhaustive detail about how she carried them out.

She plans with extreme precision and executes these plans with ease and no regrets. It is only on reflection that I realise just how vile her deeds were. While I was absorbed in her world, the violence and immorality of her acts was camouflaged by her planning, precision and rationalisation.How To Kill Your Family is a lovely fantasy where truly awful people eventually get their comeuppance and don’t live a charmed life, skating by on superficial charm and privilege. What. A. Book. Huge thank you to @boroughpress and @netgalley for my copy! How to Kill Your Family is hilarious, dark, gripping - it is at some points completely batshit and it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year. Grace is an intriguing character who at times, the reader can only admire for her gumption, drive and unapologetic cruelty. I don’t aspire to become a Grace-like psychopathic killer, but I would like to imitate certain aspects of her strong but complicated character in my own life. Her ambition and determinism is, while directed in completely the wrong places, inspiring. She is exactly what a woman is told she shouldn’t be. She is goal driven, selfish and behaves in a way that diametrically opposes the stereotypical image of a subdued woman. Nobody would consider Grace a role-model but her sense of freedom from the many expectational chains placed on almost every human being, must have made her an incredibly cathartic character to write about. 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.

i thought it was going to follow the protagonist plotting all the different murders - but that was barely focused on at all. instead of focusing on the story/plot, the protagonist goes on irrelevant rants about social/cultural observations which were clearly made by the author e.g. there was a big passage about the dangers of smart devices and smart homes. if the author wanted to write about these observations, why didn’t she just write an essay collection???

To beat the boredom, Grace starts writing her life story, detailing the crimes she has committed, explaining how she’s been bumping off her estranged family in incredibly creative ways – think Midsomer murders and the inventive deaths on that TV show and you’re in the same ballpark. 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. 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.