Well hello to you my reader chums! I’m a big fan of a murder mystery or any crime-related fiction that I couldn’t wait to give this one a read after raving reviews.

If you’ve heard about this book and are keen to learn more, here is my honest review of How to kill your family by Bella Mackie.

The plot line follows Grace Bernard and her drive for revenge, revenge on her family. It follows her life story as she sat in a prison cell relaying the murders she planned out and achieved, whilst being incarcerated for a crime she didn’t. The story is told from Grace’s perspective and reads like a diary without the instalments. It’s honest, emotion-led and addictive to her perspective.

The characters and relationships in this book are interesting concepts as it’s told purely from Grace’s perspective with no influence on anyone else. Grace is a very distinctive, bold, angry and honest character. She speaks her mind, exactly what she’s thinking with no second thought. Grace is intelligent and holds all her emotions in, spending years planning the murders to every detail. She is weirdly dedicated to something so truly awful towards people she’s never met.

The other relevant characters include her mother, who Grace describes fondly with love and care for her. She’s one of two characters which Grace describes as love, the other being her best friend Jimmy. They grew up together and it’s the only present person in the novel she truly cares about and has focus on, aside from her killing spree planning.

The Artemis family are Grace’s victims and every member in Grace’s eyes is horrid, selfish and a waste to the world. Her dad, Simon in this family, hurt her mother so incredibly deeply and it spurred Grace’s revenge to kill them off one by one.

Overall, I enjoyed this book thoroughly for various reasons. As it was written from Grace’s perspective, the book has a fast pace and read more like a conversation than a story which I loved, because it had an emotive dialogue. The book heavily focused on dark humour and took the emotions out of killing people. It was strange and shocking.

I loved the structure of this book as it sped along at the right pace, moving from the present to the past, with Grace sharing her current day-to-day in prison, and moving back in time to what happened with her plans. To me, the structure was clever and enticed me more to read on, so much so, I was addicted to what happens next in the plot.

I’m not going to give anything away but the ending was a little bit of a disappointment in all honestly. I felt like the writer could have ended it in many other ways, rather than throwing a different plot twist in. 

I hope you enjoyed this review. What are you currently reading? <3