How To Kill Your Family

Written By Linda Malek
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How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
Reviewed by Linda
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Many thanks to @boroughpress for this copy!

How do I find the words to describe this amazing debut novel from Bella Mackie? What we have here is a hilariously clever and superior book that dissects every single facet of the contemporary society we live in whilst also examining the power of the super rich and famous.

Meet Grace Bernard, the dejected product of a fling between her late mother and one of the world’s wealthiest men, Simon Artemis. Unacknowledged by her father before birth and following the death of her mother as a teen, Grace grows up a stone’s throw away from the Artemis empire and is left to fend for herself in the only way she knows how: vengeance. Here begins her quest to annihilate the Artemis family, one member at a time, to attain eternal peace and her rightful inheritance of course. Despite her particularly skewed moral compass, you will root for Grace as she deals with her own demons and anxieties, whilst trying to restore order in the age of influencers, lip fillers, white saviour complexes, and performative gestures. With the toolkit of a hyperaware millennial, each cold-blooded murder is calculated with the utmost precision - there are no foolish gimmicks and actually, the level of detail had me thinking I was reading crime fiction!

You’d be forgiven in thinking that Grace’s observations, intricately woven in by Bella, are a factual social commentary in the form of non-fiction. As we follow oligarchs and former Etonians perched on top of their Trust Funds and/or accounts in [insert tax haven here] - this could well be a damning exposé of that certain level of upper-class British society hidden behind the Hampstead foliage and wisteria. Bella uses her artistic license to get so close to the wire. The plot is shrewd, the messaging is important and it is confirmed that Bella's wordplay is as glorious in fiction as it is in non-fiction. In my opinion, the author has redefined satire.

If you’re picking this up expecting a Killing Eve dupe then you’ll be disappointed because How To Kill Your Family is 100x smarter and deeper than that, and that’s a fact.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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