I thought from the opening couple of chapters that I was about to be proved wrong. How to Kill Your Family had a strong narrative voice and some amusingly cynical comments about the empty lives of rich people. But it went downhill rapidly. You’ll be gripped… Grace’s emotional detachment throughout will give you chills’ Rated 5 stars by COSMOPOLITAN To beat the boredom, Grace starts writing her life story, detailing the crimes she has committed, explaining how she’s been bumping off her estranged family in incredibly creative ways – think Midsomer murders and the inventive deaths on that TV show and you’re in the same ballpark.

How To Kill Your Family is a book about Grace’s determination to kill her father’s side of the family having been planning it since she found out he left her mother to fend for herself despite being an incredibly wealthy individual. As aforementioned, Grace then goes on a killing spree of her father’s offspring and family in an attempt to, I presume, make herself feel better for the loss of her mother and take some revenge on him for never being there for her. How To Kill Your Family Plot – 3/5

The story in How To Kill Your Family is fairly simple – we start off with Grace in Limehouse Prison for a murder she actually didn’t commit retelling the tales of some murders she did commit. It sounds like a really good premise and one that could have been executed so much better. Addictive… Grace Bernard is one of the most intriguing and bewitching protagonists I've read in years’ EMMA GANNON It may seem as though this a straightforward tale of revenge but there’s more to it than that. It’s about family, it’s about class and the patriarchy – structures and systems that Grace is subverting. This is a brutally honest portrayal of a young woman nursing a lot of rage in her heart and directing her anger, sometimes justified, sometimes less so, at every irritating thing that crosses her path. From the entitlement of the rich to the smugness of the middle class to the squalor of the poor, no one is safe from her acerbic observations, not even the relatively wealthy woman who takes her in as a teenager and attempts to instill feminist virtues in her new ward:

Our narrator Grace has been hard done by, there is no ifs nor buts about that. Which means it’s easy to support her actions, even though she’s killing seniors and teenagers alike. You’re not cheering her on per se, but your moral compass has shifted because, Grace has had a hard life for no real reason about from inconsideration from those around her. Also, it’s easy to like Grace because she’s confident with sarcastic quips and often is saying what we’re thinking but are too reserved to say ourselves. I spent my 20s enjoying journalism but also knowing ‘I have slightly stumbled into this’. I knew lots of journalists, my dad was a journalist. I did it without thinking about it. And then I thought, ‘I don’t really know where I’m gonna go with this, because I’m not my dad ...’” She left journalism aged 33, to write Jog On and says that writing the book “felt like the beginning of my life”. 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.

Children’s book of the week

The plague of these past years - if we exclude the pandemic, obviously - is the publishing industry’s obsession with creating a good-looking cover. Because you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but everybody does that ‘cause the cover is always a big deal! Once anything seemed possible, the further twists were not surprising and in fact made it a depressing finish. It started off with a good idea. A girl who wants revenge on her family and kills them all but ends up being put in jail for a murder she did not commit. The idea was there. The execution was not. Surprisingly, even though I was privy to all of the grisly details of Grace's horrific crimes, I never stopped rooting for her. How To Kill Your Family is a fantastic read for anyone who loves dark humour. It’s fun to find yourself anticipating the details of the next murder as she goes through them all and I found myself delighting in how clever she was when planning each one. By the end I was rooting for her to not just get out of jail for the one murder she didn’t commit but to fulfill her plan despite how awful she is. The round-up: