How To Kill Your Family: A Review

[Spoiler Warning]

One should not judge a book by its title. This one, I did not. The intriguing name (no personal motive here) and the Sunday Times Bestseller tag made me pick it off the shelves, when I was looking for nothing in particular. Perhaps, I should have read the prologue before buying the book. By the time I did that, it was late. 

As per an interview, How To Kill Your Family piqued the interest of Anya Taylor Joy such that she spontaneously agreed to take up the Netflix adaptation of the 2021 book by Bella Mackie. Anya will play the protagonist Grace Bernard, the illegitimate daughter of an affluent businessman, who has abandoned the young girl and her mother. The story, as the name suggests, follows a series of murders as Grace tries to avenge her mother, who lived a life of struggle while the father enjoyed a comfortable life with his ‘real’ family.

I had imagined it would not be as obvious as that. 

The story, in style typical to first-time authors, follows a first-person narrative where the reader is taken through each killing and the characters’ backstories. Grace is writing her story in a diary while in prison for a murder that she did not commit. It sounds a little implausible. A woman falsely framed for murder and hoping to get an acquittal but listing the names and modus operandi of all the killings she did carry out. In prison, there is hardly a chance that she could keep the diary hidden, especially with a prying cellmate. For a murderer who has planned five murders and got away with them without raising suspicion, it is a gross oversight.

Then some cliches fill up the initial few chapters, including the very famous parable of the drowning man, a devout Christian refusing rescue attempts in the hope that god will save him. When he dies, God asks, ‘Who do you think sent the rescuers?’ The story is reproduced verbatim when most readers would have got it with a simple reference. As the book approaches the middle, the narrative gets more engaging. However, the long-wound descriptions of characters and their situations remain, digressing from the main plotline too often. If one manages to overlook these, the story has an interesting premise – a young woman bent on seeking revenge on behalf of her dead mother. But by the end of the book, suddenly and jarringly, the writer brings in a new narrator. This person is now talking to Grace, not to the reader, through a letter. Most would find two of the last three chapters from a new narrator’s point of view a bit difficult to adapt to. Even the font is glaringly different, which makes switching back and forth an effort.

In the second last chapter, Grace does return to continue the story and tell us that she is about to be released from jail. She is oblivious to the new character’s actions, which leaves much to be understood in the backdrop of the events that the entire book had been building up to. This new character, a deus ex machina used by the author, throws the reader off tangent instead of creating an element of surprise. One does not even get to say goodbye to the person who was telling them the story all along.

Mackie’s debut novel has a few loose ends too – a death left to chance and never explained to the reader, the protagonist missing a constant stalker despite being a meticulous planner. 

Going back to the prologue, the author had swapped the word ‘astrologer’ for ‘astronomer’ here. I’d have thought it was deliberate and to show that the narrator does not know the difference between the two. But having read the book, I realise that is not Grace Bernard. It is perhaps an indicator, like the twist at the end, that the author was in a hurry to wrap up the book and submit it to the publisher.

I am hoping the series would tie up the loose ends and offer a more coherent package.