Description
How to Kill Your Family is not a normal thriller. In her first novel, journalist and writer Bella Mackie turns the genre on its head by telling a darkly funny vengeance story through the twisted psyche of Grace Bernard. This book is half a confessional memoir, half a harsh social critique, and half a psychological study. It looks at what occurs when a woman feels she has to take justice into her own hands.
Grace Bernard has a goal that she works for with calm determination and careful planning. She’s not crazy or out of control; she’s calm and methodical. Grace chooses to even things out herself after seeing her single mother suffer in poverty while her rich, powerful father denied her existence. What does she want? To kill every member of the wealthy family that left them behind.
It’s not Grace’s ability to be violent that makes her such an interesting narrator; it’s how clearly she writes. She tells the story of her misdeeds with a calm, dry sense of humor and a sarcastic inner voice. She doesn’t want forgiveness or even pity. She just wants the reader to get it. And, shockingly, a lot of them do. Grace is not the bad person society makes her out to be; she is a sign of it.
Mackie looks at class privilege, income inequality, social invisibility, and the silly moral rules that govern public opinion through the narrative of Grace. The people Grace hurts may be her own family, but they also show how the rich don’t care about the problems of those who aren’t in their circle. She doesn’t commit crimes by accident; she does them on purpose. Every act of violence is a criticism of the way power works, how families betray each other, and how the legal system only sees some things.
The story’s drama doesn’t simply come from the killings; it also comes from the fact that Grace is jailed for something she didn’t do, not for any of her well-planned crimes. Readers are sucked into the book’s main paradox: she’s guilty but unfairly imprisoned as she writes her memoir in prison. This is a harsh joke that shows how the world doesn’t often punish the proper people.
How to Kill Your Family is both funny and scary. It is a criminal fiction that doesn’t follow the usual detective or redemption story. Instead, Bella Mackie writes a brilliant, thought-provoking book about revenge, justice, and the masks women wear to get by in a world that always underestimates them.
About the Author
Bella Mackie is a British journalist and author known for her fearless commentary on mental health, society, and gender. Before turning to fiction, she wrote the bestselling non-fiction book Jog On. How to Kill Your Family is her debut novel and quickly became a chart-topping sensation in the UK and beyond.
Product Details
- Title: How to Kill Your Family
- Author: Bella Mackie
- ISBN-13: 9780008365937
- Publisher: Borough Press
- Published: July 2021
- Pages: 368
- Binding: Paperpack
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