How To Kill Your Family

Written By Linda Malek

How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
Reviewed by Mimi
📘📘📘📘📘

Full confession. I was howling with laughter reading this book. It felt wrong but oh so right. Bella has managed to masterfully deconstruct the elite in a way which was far too entertaining for a book that is centred around murder. Grace, the protagonist, is someone I want to be friends with. She is clever, independent and just so entertaining. She seeks vengeance on the family of her father who never recognised her following an affair with her mother. As we follow the story, you can't quite believe how meticulous she has been in putting everything together.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. It’s satirical, entertaining, graphic, smart and everything you want in a novel. It's a unique read that keeps you gripped all the way through. There is no mystery to this, she kills members of her family with no remorse and for a while at least, no consequences. The style is so matter-of-fact and let me tell you now, I think the ending was PERFECT! It's totally unexpected and brilliant.

Honestly Bella, how dare your first novel be this good!

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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