In Review: How to Kill Your Family
Some people judge books by their covers. I judge them by their titles. With such a bold title that makes you question the mental state of the reader, How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie is exactly what you should expect. Not a step-by-step guide if that’s what you are wondering, but the tale of an unhinged woman in her quest for revenge against her family.
Title: How to Kill Your Family Author: Bella Mackie Publication year: 2021 Length: 10 hours 50 minutes Genre: Crime, Drama Pace: Slow Story focus: Character
The book starts in Limehouse, an all-women prison, where Grace is telling the story of how she successfully killed six members of her family and, yet, she is serving time for a crime she didn’t commit. Without any friends inside prison, and outside, she decided to occupy her time by writing about the murders she committed. And those pages are the book we are reading.
Grace lays the picture straight away. She was the daughter of a single mother, Marie. They never had much money. Her mother died when she was 14 due to cancer. Marie worked herself to death to provide for her daughter instead of seeking medical help. When she died, Grace lived for a brief period with a friend of her mother. She was the one who revealed the identity of her father, Simon Artemis, one of the wealthiest men in London. And so a revenge plan starts to take shape. Grace wants the Artemis family to pay for abandoning her and her mother, leading to Marie choose to work over getting treatment since they had no support when her father was filthy rich.
I know what you’re thinking. “This is an exaggerated reaction”. “They weren’t the reason her mother died”. Or “I don’t know if I’ll like reading about innocent people being killed”. Don’t worry! The Artemis family is terrible! Bella Mackie really managed to tell a story in a way that won’t make you feel sorry for the people who die while also making you root for Grace even though she isn’t a lovable character at all, oh… and a murderer. Obviously, no matter how many excuses Grace gives to herself and the reader, she is a killer, a murderer. However, moral justice ends up speaking louder. Grace is essentially “cleaning the world of bad people”. The Artemis are racist. They exploit people, mistreat everyone around them, value their money and status above all else, and don’t care about anyone other than themselves. And Grace is our “hero” who is bringing some sort of justice for them being horrible people.
I wish I could say that I enjoyed this book from cover to cover, although it was hard to get into. It’s a slow-developing story about how Grace committed the crimes and the time in between each one. The story also delves into the present day with the relationships and experiences of Grace in prison. As well as some of Grace’s past. Although none of this ever interrupted the momentum of the story. The pace is always the same, so there’s never a feeling of a break. However, this also means that, unless I’m ready for a slow journey, it can be hard to find the motivation to keep reading.
The story is punctuated with satire and sarcastic commentary on society. Grace is a loner, so you can imagine she has a lot to say. And those small pieces are what make you warm up to her even though she makes it hard to like her. It wasn’t until the end, that I realised I liked Grace. While it was hard, at first, to have her as the narrator, I became used to her. Her quest for revenge became something mundane, promising to only hurt those who poison the world. I couldn’t hate her when she showed to be more human than the Artemis despite what she was doing.
It was never a story to get me on the edge of my seat. The final chapters were a big drag, which I believe is intentional. They were excessively long, and it’s even stated in those chapters that there is a lot of rambling. And so, I’m supposed to hate those chapters. To make them the last nail in the coffin. It was at this moment I realised I wanted Grace to be successful. I was on her side. And having to go through those awfully boring chapters was what told me that.
There isn’t much else to this story other than about Grace’s time in prison, how she murdered her family without getting caught, and the crime she was put away for that she didn’t commit. It wasn’t an exciting story, but also not boring. However, the ending was very moving for me. I couldn’t believe the story would end like that. After everything Grave had done, this was going to be her end. I didn’t like it because I never saw Grace’s reaction. But the strong emotional reaction Bella Mackie got out of me, tells me I liked this book more than I thought. I was enjoying knowing Grace and following along her murderous adventures even though I didn’t notice. And if she wants to come back and maybe establish an agency for justice-seeker murderers, I’m here to read it.
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