How To Kill Your Family - Bella Mackie [Review]

Grace Bernard is currently residing in Limehouse Prison. After discovering details of her millionaire absentee father and how he snubbed her dying mother's pleas for help, she launches a plan to systematically kill his family in revenge. Only, the murder she is prison for is one she did not commit, and to escape her insufferable cell-mate Kelly, and count down the days to her potential release, she pens her story.

Grace is really not much different to the average millennial, you can see that she is an accurate portrayal of a product of her time and her environment. She is highly opinionated and not afraid to express her opinions (though possibly only this candidly because she is protected by an element of disassociation through her writing). She feels extremely familiar.

Grace is flawed, which everyone seems to love in a protagonist, but her shortcomings are realistic. Mackie hasn’t just listed flaws convenient to the narrative in an obvious manner, no, she is flawed but in a way that many of us are, and there are genuine links between the trauma she experienced growing up and her outlook as an adult. In many ways she is a victim herself, and for periods while she is recounting her story you find yourself strangely rooting for the murderer. Then suddenly you feel a great deal of sympathy for her victims and disdain toward Grace. 

One thing that really impressed me about this book is Mackies ability to critically assess so many social and political issues in such a natural way. She navigates the reader around so many issues; racism, sexism, classism, toxic masculinity, the dangers of smart technology, relationships, the issues with exposing too much information online, corruption amongst the political and financial elite, lad culture, the rough sex defence controversy, the replacement of ownership with subscriptions, the UK prison crisis, and so on. You can pretend to think a book that talks about politics is bad because all you want to do when reading is escape, but everything is political as this book proves; her comments on all the above topics are all political. Politics subconsciously shapes what you choose to write about and why you do so, and it massively dates a book and cements it in history. The references are not forced, they are genuine gripes expressed at relevant moments with appropriate tact.

I also have to commend the planning and research that must’ve gone into this book. In a book where you are detailing murders and how she got away with them you have to ensure that each is unique and interesting, that they could actually happen, and that the murderer could realistically get away with it. From my perspective she did this well and there are a few touches that exemplify this for me; at one stage she makes a fake social media profile and is concerned about someone doing a reverse image search on her stolen profile picture, so she uses a screenshot from a video to prevent this. It’s an example of an added touch that isn’t necessary but prevents comments of it being unrealistic or not well thought through. Throughout the book she momentarily dips into tangents about inheritance, charitable trusts, and some slightly esoteric (and somewhat new) tax legislation regarding overseas property investors. These touches are relatively inconsequential to the story, and not many will even appreciate what she is referencing, but as someone in that industry it was an unexpected reference that I appreciated and no doubt there were others like this that I was less au fait with.

Finally, it’s funny. Being funny is a lot about delivery, and so to get the best out of a book written by someone else you have to read it as it was intended, and it’s almost impossible to know what that is. As such, I have never really come across a book that I have laughed at, but Grace here is unequivocally funny. I listened to part of this on audio, and so if you can I would suggest you listen to the audiobook; at times it felt like a friend talking to you, partly due to Charly Clive’s delivery and partly because I think this book was simply suited to me; the protagonist and I are similar ages, with similar upbringings and I’ve met at least one person that reminds me of pretty much every character that makes an appearance here.

Quite possibly my favourite book of the year so far.