Reviews with content warning for Body horror - How to Kill Your Family

Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie

14 reviews

abi_sarah's review

dark funny medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Took me a while to get into it, but I really loved this book!

Bella Mackie’s writing was so witty and painfully honest. The familial annoyances that Grace felt throughout were so relatable - she just had an extreme response to them! 😅

I felt like the first deaths happened a little to early, so there was a then a bit of a lull for me where I lost interest a bit. It soon picked ip again though and held my interest until the very end. The last 35-30% really had me gripped - there were just so many new twists and turns that I just wanted to keep reading!

The only thing I would stay that stops it from being 5 stars, is that sometimes I found Grace’s reasoning behind her murders a little shallow? Maybe it was just me, but a bit of believability escaped there for me.

Excellent writing from Bella Mackie, highly entertaining! Great story-telling too! Loved the plot twists, so imaginative!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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annamariesreads's review

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dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

Wow... I wouldn't usually bother with a review on a book I hated but I couldn't believe how much I hated this novel.

Every character lacked believability, mostly because they were horrendously one note. Characters don't have to be likeable (I actually love to hate characters) but they do need to compel you into following their story.

The writing is heavy handed. I don't need the narrator to tell me when something is ironic!

Also the fatphobia and body image comments really drove me up the wall.

The beauty of interpretation is that you could possibly chalk this down to the anti-heroine (if you can call such a flat character this) being repulsive. But it shouldn't feel like the reader is being hit over the head with a mallet.

I did actually have a chuckle at some astute observations of British people, so this gained the book one star. However, these observations were not just comments, they went on way too long (sometimes for paragraphs) and we would lose the plot a bit. They would go from a funny gag to another snide comment real quick.

I hesitated from dnfing because I wanted to see if there would be a raison d'être for this novel. It all seemed rather pointless.

It was clear she wouldn't stay in prison for long on such tenuous charges.

and somehow the ending was even worse. I did read Bella Mackie's interview where she justified the ending by saying (paraphrasing here) that

women get shit on by men all the time and therefore it was the appropriate ending.

This made me laugh because this comment is just as heavy handed as the clunky writing I had just witnessed.

I wouldn't waste your time with this one. This will be the last time I read a "most popular" listed book.

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theelliad's review against another edition

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3.5

How to Kill Your Family is the account of serial murders told from the perspective of the killer as she serves jail time for a murder she didn’t commit.

The narrative voice of this novel is hilarious and sarcastic and truly kept me engaged, alongside this the dual timeline of the story is handled well and it was structurally enjoyable and followable. That said, I was disappointed by the ending, the twist was not the best but I thought fitted the story well, it was rather the transformation in Grace (the protagonist) in the final chapters. The self sufficient, powerful and somewhat narcissistic personality she has established falls victim to the writers need for a conclusion becoming submissive, easily forgiving and a bit boring as the final events of her life are recounted; it was this, more so than the plot twist, which didn’t feel right to me. However, that said I did enjoy this book enough to speed through it in a matter of days and so I cannot judge it too harshly!

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