I was promised clever planning and sinister plots to take out the family, I was promised some real wrong done by the family beyond not being in the protagonist’s life. How to Kill Your Family by Emma Mackey promised a lot but failed to deliver on any of it.

Grace Bernard, 28, has killed six members of her estranged family. You can surmise that much from the title itself. But the thing is, it wasn’t clever, the murders were almost incidental — an opportunity suddenly arisen — no concrete plan, just an intense wish to see this family dead who never acknowledged her existence, a child born out of wedlock.

Grace is selfish, self-indulgent and ill-prepared. Things just happen to go her way. While I understand the anger as she makes it a point to make the readers sympathise, is killing really not an overreaction for the wrongs she has been done? — I could not escape this question throughout the read.

Grace’s family is bad, but she is, in fact, the worst of them when it comes to entitlement.

This posed as an “eat the rich” plot but then lost the context in providing too many justifications for her actions for something done to her that isn’t even that uncommon. The book came off as darkly funny to me. Grace murders people and gets away by framing them as accidents even as members of the same family are taken off the board.

Grace spends 90% of the books excusing her actions and reading The Second Sex in the bathtub to justify it all. We don’t really get any glimpse of the actual planning that had gone into it and it feels like there was none. Grace judging everyone else from her high-horse also reads very ironic.

Apparently, reading feminist literature made her “nurture” her anger, I did not get why feminism needed to brought in as justification for her revenge plot. Grace’s character felt like a parody of a vicious feminist figure.

While I am anyway not a big fan of single pov narrative, living in Grace’s head for the duration of the book was exhausting. Her murders are left so much to inopportune moments that I was worried she was going to get busted. Well, she did.

In that way, Harry’s existence and better thought out plan was inevitable. I will let you figure out who he is. But in making him inevitable the message is perpetuated that an Artemis man will always walts in and steal the fruits of a woman’s labour.

The author adds a second pov in the largely stream of consciousness narrative and both narrators often go “Oh, I am rambling, I am boring you” and that has never been truer for any book I have read before. I was bored out of my mind. The only thing the book successfully killed was my interest in it.

I am almost scared to pick up the sequel but also curious to see what happens to Grace. In that, I suppose it succeeded. I am this salty about the books majorly because it had such potential and it just completely failed to deliver.

You can grab your copy of How to Kill Your Family by Emma MacKey here.

(I earn a small commission from every qualified purchase from the link to continue reading and reviewing)

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Have you read any of the books by Emma MacKey or this book specifically? What are your thoughts on them?

Feel free to drop a comment or reach out to me across social media at @thecalcuttanbibliophile. I would love to hear from you.