How to Kill Your Family: THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Paperback – 13 July 2021

Quality of book is so good

Often when you see a book title and cover, you think you know the direction the story will take. It will be predictable, and within that formulaic storyline, you will find entertainment and relaxation. And then comes a book like this where your assumptions fall flat after a few plot twists and you are left satisfied at having being proven wrong.Grace Bernard has been in prison since 14 months. And she’s quite irritated about it. Why, you ask? Is she innocent? Au contraire! She has killed six people. The problem is that she got away with all those murders, and is in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. The irony! What follows is a heartfelt and humorous confession of sorts with Grace revealing what made her kill her family members and how she “executed” her plans.A major chunk of the story comes to us via a journal that Grace is writing in prison to divulge her outrage at having being unfairly imprisoned. This journal broadly contains three elements: Grace’s background about why her family became her target, her modus operandi behind the crimes, and her life in prison. Each of these is interestingly written with a great deal of sarcasm and practicality. The book goes by very fast because of her candid approach about her offences.Grace is such an interesting character. As most of the book is in the first person perspective of Grace, you will enjoy being in her mind as she unveils her life story. For one, it was refreshing to see a lead character acknowledge that she was attractive, such a refreshing change from all those beauties who seem unaware of their appeal until a man convinces them otherwise. Grace is also meticulous in planning out her tasks. The sincerity with which she plans out her targeted murders is simultaneously admirable and scary. She actually delights in her crimes, but she isn’t a psychopath. She is judgemental but justifies her critiques with a solid reasoning. This is one confusing character who will still make a mark on your heart.The story is dark and gruesome but Grace’s macabre deeds are overshadowed by her wittiness. The humour in the book is quite acerbic and tongue-in-cheek. I especially enjoyed those barbs at SM influencers in the Briony section. Couldn’t stop myself laughing at Grace’s hashtags!Overall, this is an easy-going book that seems predictable until you see that it is not quite as you thought. Pick it up when you want some light-hearted humour with dark twists.Trigger Alert: Spoiler Ahead: (Some of the content contains details of BDSM, so if that gets your goat, consider yourself warned.)The one thing I wish I could change about the book: its cover. That bland salmon pink cover just doesn’t do justice to this story. I would have preferred it bolder and darker.A 4.25 from me.I received a complimentary copy of this book at my request and these are my honest thoughts about it.

I have to return the book as the cut is large and deep. And I wont be able to maintain the book in my collection. The book can fall apart anytime .

I was expecting the books to be original and first print but it was the second copy and the print was horrible. The book was damaged and the pages were empty.

The condition of the book was really really good. Super happy !For review of the book check out @literary.bliss

It started out pretty well but then went downhill. Its quite slow paced for my reading taste, I also found the main character quite dislikeable, though reading the reviews I think I'm the odd one out here haha! The twist at the end was so disappointing! To have such a strong female character be thwarted by a man is so typical and I did find it quite annoying.

We’ve all had those moments when we’d quite happily throttle our nearest and dearest, right? But they’re moments, brief passings of fury that dissipate as quickly as they arrive. But not for Grace. She’s hell bent on wiping out her parts of her family. She plans, she infiltrates before carrying out her dastardly plan. And her plans are extreme but executed perfectly.The way Mackie splits the story between Grace’s incarceration and how she proceeds to eliminate those members of her family is entertaining. Then dropped in sporadically are snippets of Grace’s childhood and teen years – these are heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time as Grace goes through more in her formative years than most do in their first 30! I really took to Grace despite her intentions. She’s a focused young woman and is determined to complete her mission. She’s thorough in her planning and execution, her dedication to her own cause admirable.I thoroughly enjoyed Mackie’s debut novel. Her writing flows smoothly between past and present. This isn’t a regular crime novel; it’s kind of a cross genre kind of book. If you’ve read Jog On, you’ll be in for a surprise; this (unsurprisingly) is nothing like Mackie’s first foray as a published author. Mackie inserts a bucket load of dark humour into the story of real vengeance. I really hope this is the start of some dark and twisted novels from Mackie’s keyboard.

Oooooh what a juicy, juicy book. It’s so dark and twisted and bloody, but funny and entertaining and joyful and, bizarrely, uplifting,Whilst I don’t necessarily approve of mass familicide, the main character of Grace Bernard is such an empowering woman and I feel like I absolutely love her - which seems completely wrong.Bella has a way of crossing between the past and present, and even characters, smoothly and I never once got confused as to where in her story we were. The amount of description used is just right; it gives you enough to cling to when reading the story, but it doesn’t overwhelm it and become one of these “why use one word when you can use five” kind of books.And that twist at the end!!! I’m not saying anything, but boy did I not see it coming, any of it, which to me is the sign of a good thriller/murder mystery writer.This is Bella’s debut fiction book and I truly hope it’s the start of a long line of others. It’s so unusual to anything I’ve read before and I can really see Bella being a real tour de force for the future.Also, it’s just screaming out for a TV adaptation starring Jodie Comer.

I wanted to love this book, as I do love a female psychopath and Grace was certainly that. She was cold, cynical and normally everything I love in a character. So why was it I found her so bothersome and quite frankly she got on my nerves. I constantly thought “oh get over yourself” and move on. She was as unlikeable to me as the family members she was plotting to kill were to her.I don’t think the chapter lengths helped, each one felt like a book in itself and I found myself plotting the author’s demise and how I could have done it in one sentence so why did she need 60 pages. It would have been beaten to death by hardback but as I had a kindle copy she had a lucky escape. I found it ironic that it says in the book “Life is so short, and we spend so much of it talking to terrible people about the minutiae of their nothing lives”. Change talking to, to reading about and it was very apt.So why did I keep on reading you may ask. Well as much as I hated Grace and the chapter lengths I wanted to know what got her caught and would she get out of prison. Also did she kill the one person she had saved for last and the murder that would mean the most. It was even more ironic that of all the murders she had committed she was in prison for one she swears she is innocent for.The majority of this book was 3 stars and I struggled each day to pick it up and that sucked a lot of joy out of my reading experience. However I’m glad I stuck with it as the ending was the full five stars and it was not only very clever it made me look back and see things completely differently. So my personal opinion is to definitively read it, but go in expecting this as one to slowly savour rather than a fast paced thriller which is the norm.

I wanted to love this. After all the hype around its release I was excited to read it.Others have said it and I'd agree that it's unnecessary, lengthy descriptions add nothing to the book and that the main character is so unlikeable. She really is! I kept trying to be on her side and put myself in her shoes but after every b****y comment she made about people's appearances or lifestyles I just hated her more and more. It felt like the whole book was just one long (and unasked for) opinion on every other character. Constant digs about how people walk, talk, dress, look, work....honestly, just filler.No real substance to anything and I felt no connection or empathy for any character. It took me about 4 months to read the whole thing and it felt like a massive chore. Someone should check on the author, felt like a lot of projected feeling and thoughts!Give it a miss.