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

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There were some chapters where we’re treated to her reflections on life in prison, the futile attempts to reform prisoners and the stupidity of her fellow inmates. As a fiction debut for author Bella Mackie (the Sunday Times bestselling author of Jog On: How Running Saved My Life), I found How To Kill Your Family to be a real page turner and one which I was able to consume over just a couple of days. I urge you to delve into the mind of this perplexing and amusing character on her journey to wipe out her family, if only to reconfirm your suspicions that the human mind is strangely complicated, or if not that, to get some ideas for how you might tackle your own checklist! I also found the subplot of the crime she didn't commit (yet found herself in prison for) very predictable from an early stage. It’s Killing Eve in style, with some awesome scenes, some brilliant thinking and fantastic character development.

Their constant striving for more and never being satisfied seeps from the pages and made me cringe with embarrassment for their classlessness.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. If Mackie wanted to lecture us all on her distate for smart homes and influencer culture then I don’t understand why she didn’t just publish a collection of essays. How to Kill Your Family had a strong narrative voice and some amusingly cynical comments about the empty lives of rich people. I will never forget the look on my mum’s face when I asked her to grab my reservation from the library. Needless to say, I did not enjoy this book, and only the very last 3 pages of this book made me give it an additional star for the sheer irony.

Making everything and everyone — bobble hat wearers, old people, influencers, fat people and environmentalists — a target for snide remarks didn’t make the book any funnier. I also found this 'crime' to be very frustrating as she is ultimately convicted of something when the entirety of the case for prosecution was based on eyewitness testimonies of people who weren't even on the balcony. An unhappy Grace Bernard is in Limehouse Prison after having been convicted for murder, and she has every reason to be upset, she is an innocent woman. The murders feel entirely distinct from one another, giving the overall feel of a bunch of short stories tacked together; it's disjointed and clumsy. She is the author of Jog On (2018) , a memoir about running and mental health and her debut novel, How to Kill Your Family (2021).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. She hates fat people, she hates instagrammers, she hates rich people, she hates men, she hates a lot of women for inane reasons, she hates everything, apparently. My original star rating of How To Kill Your Family was 3* as I found the ending, with a new character introduced in the final chapters who altered the course of the ending, to be very disappointing.