2.5 rounded down to 2

I would describe the whole of 'How to Kill Your Family' as decidedly weaker than the sum of its parts.

Let me explain.

Here's a book where each individual componant feels strong in its essence, but not in its execution.

Let's start with voice.

Our primary POV character and first person narrator, Grace, has a very strong voice. However, while the tone remains consistant, the stances taken by that character just...don't. There's a veneer of 'wokeness' that Bella Mackie seemed to want to include, but it creates issues when paired with the character she created.

Grace is a miserable melt in almost every way imaginable. She's highly judgemental and narcissistic, lacks anything but surface-level introspection, and is completely self-rightious. Not exactly the logical mouthpiece for feminism or the right voice to speak on behalf of the working class. And yet, in truly clunky asides, Mackie has Grace virtue signal about both of those things without any indication that this character would believe in these things or feel these ways about them. Her words and actions don't line up here.

Every woman she meets is either superficial, vain, or fat, or a combination, according to Grace. And yet when faced with misgynistic male characters she's suddenly all for the 'sisterhood' and there's never any indication that she sees the hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance of holding both of those positions. The closest we get to any kind of 'aha' moment is when she comments that she doesn't like female pilots and then follows that up with 'I know that's my internalized misogyny talking, but...I don't care.'

Now THAT is the truth of this character's perspective. But then, that makes a lot of the 'woke' virtue signalling seem especially lacking in teeth. So, unless Mackie's point was to criticise the things that feminists and leftists advocate for as nothing more than virtue signalling to come across as 'politically correct' (for some unexplored reason), she failed, and in fact just created a narrative that anti-feminists and alt-rightwingers would point at as an example of how feminism and progressivism ARE nothing more than virtue signalling to come across as 'politically correct.'

Whoopsie.

That was my personal beef with this book (similar to my beef with Song of Achilles as a matter of fact). I suspect that Bella Mackie actually set out to be a champion of feminism and of anti-classism, but she just lacked the skill to actually achieve that, and as a result, unintentionally ended up with a bad message. The opposite message, in fact, to the one she probably set out to make.

This is compounded by how caricature the 'bad guys' in this story are. No redeeming qualities at all. Mackie tried to make it seem more 'shades of grey' by making one member of the family a nice person, but it's not like that 'saves' them--Grace decides to kill them anyway on the grounds that they're in the way and would likely (in her opinion) just end up turning bad if left alive. Uh huh. Ok. For a story that goes out of its way to ground itself in realism, that just doesn't cut it.

Now, again, one could argue that that's 'just the character' as though that somehow excuses bad writing, but see below for my rebuttle there. Essentially though, it boils down to: 'if you're going to go that route, you have to have the writing chops to pull it off, and well, Bella Mackie ain't no Vladimir Nobokov.

My smaller, more quibbly issues with HTKYF were as follows:

1. I didn't like Grace's voice. I love an 'unlikeable' protagonist. Love it. But, and this is key, they have to be charismatic. Grace has less charisma than a lump of coal. She's nasty without being charming (something I'm pretty sure Oscar Wilde said is a fault). There are no witty one-liners, no creative insults, nada. Just really uncharitable observations. 'That woman is fat.' 'That woman's had too much plastic surgery,' 'that guy is ugly' 'that guy's a jerk.' And that just didn't do it for me. Certainly not considering how long this book was, but we'll get to that.

2. This book was way too long. Considering that Grace is not a fun person in whose head to hang out for any length of time, the fact that this story took up 400 pages is just way too much. We didn't really need great swathes of the actual wordcount for this story to be told effectively. They were just there on the assumption that as a reader we wanted more of Grace's repetitive, 'doomer' insights into why the world sucks. I didn't.

The twists, which seem to be the main issues people have with this book, didn't actually bother me. They felt fairly effectively tied to the main plot and not just pulled out of Mackie's ass to liven up the climax. I was fine with them. If I didn't think the book had already been wrecked by all the other issues I might turn a more crtitical eye to them, but why waste ammunition putting another hole in a ship that's already sinking?

The one part I did like was the actual plot. In more capable hands this could have been really cool, and all the charitability of my extra .5 on the rating is due to that. The execution (if I may) of each of Grace's kills was infinitely better done than anything else, and I was genuinely interested in following along with each scheme the same way horror fans (such as myself) give a good, mindless cheer for every inventive or 'cool' kill in a scary movie.

TL;DR: this gets a hard pass from me, and I have no interest in reading anything else from this author. Next!