What. A. Book. Huge thank you to @boroughpress and @netgalley for my copy! How to Kill Your Family is hilarious, dark, gripping - it is at some points completely batshit and it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year. Helene was kind, but she was hardly a great intellect, and had a fairly basic level of insight. Her favourite shows were all on ITV, if that makes it at all clearer.” HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY takes the proverbial saying "Don't get mad, get even" to exciting new levels. I read books, I follow world affairs, I have opinions on more than just shoes and golf clubs. I am better than these people, that’s not in doubt. But they look happy despite their ignorance. Perhaps because of it. What is there to worry about? None of these idiots are thinking about climate change, they’re wondering what to wear on the yacht tomorrow.

The idea is promising, Grace is a likeable character and the first chapters really hook you, even if you don't understand everything. But from there on is just a bunch of facts of her life after another, casual things that happened to her, the only two people still in her life and that horrible cellmate she unfortunately has. Grace has a plan in life: revenge. I'm not here to criticise that, her father is awful and her family are all assholes; you go, girl! But good revenge needs a smart way to be accomplished. Surprisingly, even though I was privy to all of the grisly details of Grace's horrific crimes, I never stopped rooting for her. Grace is the lead in How To Kill Your Family– yes she meets other people and has some mildly interesting interactions with others, but every story is told from her very opinionated point of view. And this is where it began to grate on me. I’m a fairly opinionated person myself, however, Grace seemed to have a fairly strong assumption of almost every single individual she meets and even doesn’t meet. She starts to become quite unlikeable and egotistical throughout with her thoughts and musings becoming degrading and almost mean at some points. Grace Bernard is in Limehouse Prison serving a sentence for a crime she didn’t commit but that doesn’t mean to say she hasn’t committed some! To relieve the boredom and the inane chatter of cell mate Kelly she decides to write her astonishing story. This tell all explains exactly what she is guilty of! This is a novel about rejection and betrayal, revenge and retribution.I’m going to be clear, the majority of characters in this book are absolutely vile. 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. For me, I quite enjoyed reading about these incredibly dark, twisted and nasty people. Ironic twists and caustic commentary on everything from liberal guilt to the consumerist con that is “selfcare” sharpen this debut novel’ OBSERVER Her motive is, on the surface, revenge, although she has never interacted with her victims prior to killing them. Why Grace’s Story Is So Powerful

And her killing her cousin, who is nice and rejects the wealth just because she thinks that because he's a man he will give in eventually and become like them anyway... Well, it felt very forced and not really a great reason to kill anyone. She sees herself as being on righteous mission to rid the world of some truly awful people without being able to see that she is in fact one of them. Part of the fun of this book is seeing if that will be part of her great undoing. She’s fascinating to read about. ONE CRITICISM: The author included some political venom and BDSM mentions (in different parts of the book!) that could have been easily deleted without compromising the storyline. A funny, compulsive read about family dysfunction and the media’s obsession with murder’ SUNDAY TIMES STYLEGrace Bernard has known for a long time that her father abandoned her mother and herself to eke out a hardscrabble London living on their own. But she’s a teenager when she realizes exactly the breadth of his neglect, and how callously his wealthy family has consigned her to the ash heap. After her mother dies of cancer when she’s thirteen, she begins to concoct a plan that will earn her not only vengeance but the inheritance she deserves. Overall, this compelling tale of calculated revenge was fast-paced, witty, and riveting, from beginning to end.

We meet Grace in prison. But as rings true throughout the novel as a whole, she is there for reasons we later discover are far more complicated than would be contained in a straightforward murder – arrest – imprisonment plot.One thing is when you expect something from a book and then you realize that's not going to happen, another story is when the book is also outrageously bad. I didn’t mind the recounting my own life so much as I just had this desperate need to get the facts right for Jog On. With mental health you obviously feel a huge responsibility to get it right and I didn’t want to misrepresent anything or offer bad advice. I also wanted it to be inclusive and not just about me. To do that justice took a lot of research which I found quite daunting, whereas with this I could basically just write from my head. At first it felt really unnerving - I was like, ‘Is this ok? Do I have to research this?’ But after a while, it actually felt like a bit of a weight off and much more freeing than non-fiction where you’ve got to get it right. Did How To Kill Your Family involve any research? Normally I was writing from about 9pm 'til 2am every day. Most of the day is taken up by other things, my husband goes to bed really early and I can't sleep until about 2am. So, when he goes to bed, I have a glass of wine, start writing and I don’t go to bed until really late. It's ridiculous and it’s not a normal way of living your life, but that’s how I wrote Jog On as well. It’s the only way I can do it and it’s the time of day when my head is quiet enough. And for this book, it worked quite nicely weirdly - writing a book about murder sitting there in the dark on your own. What role does reading play in your life?

To beat the boredom, Grace starts writing her life story, detailing the crimes she has committed, explaining how she’s been bumping off her estranged family in incredibly creative ways – think Midsomer murders and the inventive deaths on that TV show and you’re in the same ballpark. When it got to the twist in the tale at the end, I was surprised for a moment and then thought ‘well that explains it (audiobook narration)’. Then felt like an ignoramus due to the probability given the nature of the characters in question. Overall, this is very easy to read, it’s well written, I love the darkly wry style of the author who has acquired a new fan! Grow up, this is childish, hypocritical and snobbish. I would maybe understand her anger if she was 12. Not 26. And once again we have the trope of the girl that’s so “unique” and so “different” from everyone else by just being as basic, stereotypically millennial, snobbish and arrogant as any other with just a touch of deranged and vindictive psycho. The moment a teenage Grace discovers her millionaire, playboy dad rejected her and her dying mother’s pleas for help, Grace has dreamt of revenge. She wants to make him suffer and wants him to know exactly who’s behind it and why before bumping him off too.How To Kill Your Family is a lovely fantasy where truly awful people eventually get their comeuppance and don’t live a charmed life, skating by on superficial charm and privilege. How To Kill Your Family is a fantastic read for anyone who loves dark humour. It’s fun to find yourself anticipating the details of the next murder as she goes through them all and I found myself delighting in how clever she was when planning each one. By the end I was rooting for her to not just get out of jail for the one murder she didn’t commit but to fulfill her plan despite how awful she is. The round-up: The story follows Grace’s plan to kill her family, for crimes committed against both her mother and herself. I didn’t find the reasoning for the vendetta totally compelling, but as the book progressed, I felt it actually didn’t matter. It was really fun following her process - doing the research, plotting the death and then carrying it out. It’s not always straightforward (it would be a dull story if it was) but it’s quite the wild ride.