276°
Posted 20 hours ago

How To Kill Your Family By Bella Mackie & My Sister the Serial Killer By Oyinkan Braithwaite 2 Books Collection Set

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

A funny, compulsive read about family dysfunction and the media’s obsession with murder’ SUNDAY TIMES STYLE I also really loved the little insights into Grace’s societal views. They’re often added to the ends of paragraphs, and they’re caustic, witty, judgemental and completely deadpan. one of the main themes of the book was about class, but it wasn’t really discussed in any profound way, and it actually became quite trite after a while. basically the whole book involved snipes at the rich/the upper classes (which i’m usually all here for) but THEN i discovered that the author of this book is alan rusbridger’s daughter and her grandfather is a baron….so she clearly moves in some privileged social circles herself, not exactly a working class hero. after that little discovery, the constant digs at privileged white people prompted a few eye rolls from me. 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.

Ironically, Grace was in jail for a murder she did not commit, yet she was never charged for the multiple murders that she did commit. Take the plot of the Ealing film classic Kind Hearts of Coronets. Make your central character an anti-hero assassin in the vein of Villanelle from Killing Eve. Add in a lot of snarky comments about twenty-first century life and you get the essence of How to Kill Your Family. 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.

Yes, this book is truly in a league of its own. It's chilling and disturbing; yet, also LOL humorous. How to Kill Your Family also takes the reader on a psychological journey of sorts. The novel’s protagonist, 28-year-old Grace Bernard, sets off on a mission to eliminate all members of her family with an end-goal of seeking revenge on her father, millionaire businessman and stereotypical playboy who abandoned her and her mother as a baby. 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! When she hit 30 that year, she remembers thinking everything felt different. “I started running and continued seeing the therapist … all the worries and panic and irrational thoughts and not being able to get out of bed went away. I was able to live on my own for the first time and travel and do all the things I couldn’t do in my 20s. It felt like a new lease of life. I felt like a human being and not like a sad, empty shell pretending to be a human being which is what my 20s felt like”. How To Kill Your Family is a dark, sometimes brutal, delight of a novel that had me giggling one moment and cringing the next. This is not a cozy story, but there is PLENTY of dark humor and snark, which I adore. Grace is not an angel, and this may sound terrible, but I really liked her and rooted for her the whole time.

You’ll be gripped… Grace’s emotional detachment throughout will give you chills’ Rated 5 stars by COSMOPOLITAN i thought it was going to follow the protagonist plotting all the different murders - but that was barely focused on at all. instead of focusing on the story/plot, the protagonist goes on irrelevant rants about social/cultural observations which were clearly made by the author e.g. there was a big passage about the dangers of smart devices and smart homes. if the author wanted to write about these observations, why didn’t she just write an essay collection??? I don’t need to like characters but it helps to engage with them if there are some nuances to their personalities. I didn’t get that with this novel. Having killed off six people — a few of them in gruesome circumstances in a sauna or a sex club — Grace shows little remorse. Even people who had nothing to do with her father’s treatment of her and her mother got bumped off simply because they are heirs to the fortune she believes is rightly hers. 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.Maybe if I can make people laugh, they’ll also listen—ideally to women with more practical ideas about how to change the world than handing out antique skillets and shovels.” Addictive… Grace Bernard is one of the most intriguing and bewitching protagonists I've read in years’ EMMA GANNON From prison she regales us with her story, and what a story it is. Filled with dark humor, snark (my fave!), and the juicy details of her life along with the creative offing of six members of her family, she had me laughing out loud. Kudos to the author for writing such an engaging villain.

i was attracted to this book bc of the anti-heroine promise as i love an unlikeable, morally grey female character - but grace as a character was far too muddled, and it was clear that the author still hadn’t fully fleshed her out. she was clearly meant to be a character in the vein of villanelle from ‘killing eve’, but she was nowhere near as interesting or compelling 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. She plans with extreme precision and executes these plans with ease and no regrets. It is only on reflection that I realise just how vile her deeds were. While I was absorbed in her world, the violence and immorality of her acts was camouflaged by her planning, precision and rationalisation.

More episodes

I've been wanting to read a good anti-hero type story for a while, and though I've had my eye on the Sweetpea books, this one caught my eye due to the cover and the hype it received.

If now I can't even trust a nice pink cover with a girl and a shovel, I don't know what I can trust anymore. 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. Grace is an intriguing character who at times, the reader can only admire for her gumption, drive and unapologetic cruelty. I don’t aspire to become a Grace-like psychopathic killer, but I would like to imitate certain aspects of her strong but complicated character in my own life. Her ambition and determinism is, while directed in completely the wrong places, inspiring. She is exactly what a woman is told she shouldn’t be. She is goal driven, selfish and behaves in a way that diametrically opposes the stereotypical image of a subdued woman. Nobody would consider Grace a role-model but her sense of freedom from the many expectational chains placed on almost every human being, must have made her an incredibly cathartic character to write about. How To Kill Your Family is the ideal how-to guide. Within a week of finishing this book, I had successfully killed my family. And gotten away with it. Grace is clearly intelligent for example— she comes up with ingenious ways to kill her relatives without leaving any trail. Yet she completely misreads the character of her cell-mate in prison. 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. So Grace has benefited from a similar privileged life that she criticises other people for enjoying.Harriet Bourton, publisher, pre-empted world rights in a major deal for T he Best Way to Bury Your Husband and one other untitled novel from Kristina Pérez at Zeno Agency. The Best Way to Bury Your Husband will be published as a lead title in February 2024. Writing from prison, Grace tells the reader: “After all, almost nobody else in the world can possibly understand how someone, by the tender age of 28, can have calmly killed six members of her family. And then happily got on with the rest of her life, never to regret a thing.” Perhaps this assertion in the prologue is true, but having spent eighteen chapters immersed in Grace’s head, I came pretty close to understanding just how she did it. Grace Bernard is a thoroughly unlikeable person. Single-minded to the point of obsession about her plan to exact revenge, she freely exploits other people’s vulnerabilities to get what she needs. . While in prison for a murder she did not commit, she begins to keep a journal in which she documents the six murders she did commit. Each death is described in detail, Grace relishing in her ability to plan and execute killings so flawlessly that she was never suspected.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment