When Grace Bernard discovers her absentee millionaire father has rejected her dying mother’s pleas for help, she vows revenge and sets about to kill every member of his family. It’s neither a thriller nor really a domestic drama, but the diary of one very churlish individual littered with judgemental stereotypes. In an interview with Marie Claire magazine Bella Mackie said " This book is all about men having power over women and the system being rigged to make men win. As a result of this, How To Kill Your Family is not a book full of blood, guts and gore, despite being about murder. She is quite proud of the fact that she got away with it-so when she ends up in jail, accused of a murder she didn’t commit-she decides to brag about the ones she is guilty of committing-by writing about them in a journal that she hopes someone will find locked in a safe, one day after she is dead and buried.

Shallow, self-indulged; a mean snob- it’s hard to listen to 9 hours (audiobook) of someone you fundamentally dislike. Yes, she’d made a vow as a young teenager to revenge the harm she thought her family had done to her mother but I found it hard to believe that she’d still be following that plan more than a decade later. She is scathing about wealthy people with their expensive tastes in clothing, wine, and houses yet after her mother’s death she was raised by a high-income couple who taught her to enjoy the finer things in life. This was author Bella Mackie's debut fiction book and I look forward to listening to this author's future titles.

Yet, the murders of Grace’s estranged family members are clumsly sandwiched in between these long rants.

This entry was posted in Book Reviews and tagged audiobook review, Bella Mackie, book review, Charly Clive, How To Kill Your Family, Paul Panting, Women Who Kill. And a couple of other things: her catfishing a seventeen year old boy to do hacking so she can hack into a smart home system and kill someone is just so incredibly cruel and it didn't sit well with me at all. If you’re a reader who needs characters to be nice, then this is not the book for you, because you’d struggle to find a single redeeming quality between the lot of them. It’s not a book that you have to learn anything from, it’s a book that you’re supposed to laugh at – that’s what I really want. Their constant striving for more and never being satisfied seeps from the pages and made me cringe with embarrassment for their classlessness.

Based on other reviews of this novel I've read, this clarity was definitely needed for most readers as it really takes a lot of thought before you have that lightbulb moment of understanding. I laughed out loud on more than occasion, recognising the Instagram generation and their constant pursuit of affirmation and the next dopamine hit of a few thousand likes.