How to Kill Your Family
- matthewkojotelles
- Jun 3, 2022
- 5 min read
The first thing, and the one that is the hardest to miss, is the cold and emotionless voice with which Grace thinks. She is in prison, for a crime that she didn't commit but doesn't seem to care about that fact. She is more annoyed at her cellmate trying to become friends with her, and that the actual crime that she did commit is going to go unseen.
She says it casually, as if it is the most normal and expected thing in the world, that she killed six members of her family and then went on with her life as if nothing had happened, with no cares in the world.
One thing about the construction of this book that made it a bit less palatable than I would have liked is how long some of the paragraphs are. At least at the start of the book, there isn't much dialogue to break up the constant thoughts, planning and observations inside Grace's head which sometimes makes it a bit harder to read than necessary.
Even though there were parts that were harder to read because of the lack of paragraphs, that didn't mean that there wasn't a lot of humour in this book. It sounds counterintuitive, but within a book about a character murdering her whole family, there are a lot of funny one-liners or whole paragraphs that make it easier to read. Even after just committing murder it is hard to get away from the humourous, callous way in which Grace thinks about the murders of her family. It adds a certain character to the book that you don't get to see from ones that utilise dialogue more. It is something that differentiates this book from others but also makes it readable.
Not only does Grace hold animosity towards her paternal family, but also towards her mother. She believes that it was her stupid choices that put them in the situation that they were in. They never had much money, didn't have a lot of support, and Grace was always jealous of the other people who had fathers and mothers in their lives. It is understandable for someone to think this way, and to think that her mother was naive for ignoring the plethora of red flags because there was a tonne, but people do stupid things and it is how they respond after the fact that holds real weight. It is never explicitly said, but the way she talked about her childhood and the way she talked about her mother did go to show how she did hold some resentment towards her, even if she did love, and appreciate what she did for her while she was a child.
But as with murdering people, there is always going to be hypocrisy and, especially in this situation, assumptions made that really shouldn't be. For example, one of her cousins had gone low contact with the family a few years ago, not even showing up to his grandparent's funeral, and yet she still plans to kill him. It isn't because of what he did and who he is, because from the outside looking in he looks like a good person. Volunteering at different places, not speaking to his family (which must have been a horribly hard decision) and seeming like a genuinely nice person. But because he has shared the last name with the family that she wants to eradicate from the earth, he is having to be killed.
As her mother died when she was young she was taken in by an upper-middle-class family who she first came to know through their son, Jimmy. They were close, but by this time revenge was already hard set in her heart. She was able to be swayed a few times, but her jaded look on the outside world, and assuming the worst in people before even meeting them, is something that she wasn't able to get rid of, and something that eventually convinced her to move out of their house to carry on plotting her revenge plan against the Artemis's.
One thing, one rule, that she was aiming towards was to try and leave the women out of it. Like her mother, they potentially had also been ensnared by the charm of the family that turned out to be a lie. She held sympathy towards these women, as long as they had actually been conned, and weren't actually horrible people themselves like her grandmother was. After killing her uncle, she goes to the funeral and her aunt spontaneously gets up, telling everyone how horrible the uncle was and how everyone is only there to 'grieve' because he had a lot of money and then leaves. Grace appreciates this and decides that she, as her mother had, didn't deserve any more hardships as she had been through enough already.
This is a trend of her hating men more than women, but I think in the upper echelons of society, where men have the dominant gender for a long time, it isn't hard to start blaming all those powerful and rich men for a tonne of problems that they themselves caused before acting like the victim.
One thing I did notice that was done really well was to make every kill a different situation. It never felt like it was a repeat of the same situation, which really made the book feel like a bunch of mini short stories. This made the book a lot more readable, as because it is written in the form of a diary of sorts, there is less dialogue than you would usually expect from a prose book. That doesn't mean it is bad by any means, but that does mean that it doesn't retain attention as much because being inside someone's head all the time gets exhausting, and you'd like to see them talking more with others and get their thoughts and feelings out that way. It does mesh well with her character, who doesn't seem to like anyone really, but an explanation doesn't make something suddenly unavailable.
The ending of this book was definitely something that I didn't expect, but there were obviously hints. The clearest one was after she killed her cousin, how she felt like someone was watching her, but as it was never confirmed, only a feeling that she got while she was on some experimental drugs.
This book was good, and very well put together don't be discouraged by the fact that this review is shorter than the rest. That is only because the way this book is written there is less to say about the plot, as everyone already knows what is going to happen, and we already know the personality of the main character which is fleshed out fully throughout the whole book.
While the ending was something that I didn't expect, I am not sure if I liked it or not. There is always something nice about something unexpected happening, and it was even hinted at it beforehand, but that doesn't mean that it is revealed that she had a brother who has not only been watching her the whole time but also knows that she committed the murders and even killed their dad himself.
I really think that this plays into Grace's narrative about males. He was only able to form that initial relationship with their father because he was a male. If Grace tried to do that the outcome would have been much different. It is also why when he mentions that he just had more cards it feels more insulting considering everything that Grace believed.
Overall, although it was hard to read sometimes, I did like this book and would recommend it.
8.2/10

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