Book Review: How to Kill Men and Get Away with It by Katy Brent

About the Book

Meet Kitty Collins. FRIEND. LOVER. KILLER.

Have you ever walked home at night, keys in hand, ready to throw a punch in self-defence? That’s how it all started. The killing spree, I mean.

I sort of tripped into this role… Literally. The first one was following me. That guy from the nightclub who wouldn’t leave me alone. I pushed him, he stumbled, and fell onto his own broken wine bottle. Oops. It was such a waste of a good house white.

But now I can’t seem to stop and nor do I want to… I’ve got a taste for revenge and quite frankly, I’m killing it

My Review

This was not at all what I expected – in a fabulous way. From the cover and description, I was expecting black comedy – dark humor and snarky one liners and light but scathing commentary on the state of the world. Instead I found a rather scathing indictment of male privilege and female disempowerment.

I didn’t mind this at all (in fact i rather liked it more than I expected as a result), but can see where someone going in expecting a lighter read could be severely surprised by the darkness here. It’s fairly graphic in a number of places, and there’s a lot of serious consideration of misogyny, predation, privilege, violence against women, and the aggressive backlash that could so easily develop from them. I worry that a lot of people who would find the story compelling and interesting for sociologic reasons will be turned off by the somewhat flippant cover – I hope they aren’t, because there is a lot going on here and it’s remarkably considerate in its treatment of the myriad issues presented.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and found a number of twisty things that I didn’t expect buried in its pages. Brent is an author I will definitely be following.. It was a fabulous read on many levels and I will be recommending this one for a while.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.

About the Author