Killing It Book Review

Killing It by Asia Mackay

From Goodreads: Every working mum has had to face it.

The guilt-fuelled, anxiety-filled first day back in the office after maternity leave.

But this working mum is one of a kind.

Meet Alexis Tyler.

An elite covert agent within Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Her first project back is a high-stakes hit of global significance and the old boys network of government espionage is far from ready for the return of an operational mother. But woe betide anyone who ever tells Alexis Tyler ‘you can’t’.

She will have it all. Or she’ll die trying . . .

And yes, she damn well will be home for bath time. 

First up, thank you so much to Bonnier Zaffre for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I should be pretty honest about this. Originally, I liked the sound of the book when it was pitched to me, and then my interest waned by the time it arrived in the post. Unfortunately, a mix of lots of stuff going on in my life and a huge TBR pile kinda killed it for me. But still, I always end up getting around to books in the end, so I was determined to sit down and try this one. I should also point out that Killing It was not in my usual YA fantasy or contemporary genre, since it is an adult spy thriller book. That might explain why it didn’t quite end up being my cup of tea.

I think one of the problems I had with this book was the humour. Some of the jokes were hilarious, and I laughed a lot at some of the pithy one liners. Others I didn’t get [maybe because I am not a mother and possibly can’t relate to them]. A lot of them I just didn’t find amusing. I think these unfunny jokes fell into two categories for me: ones which were just so in your face obvious and repetitive that they fell a bit flat, like the constant reminders that Lex is both a new mother and an assassin. One of these that really stuck out for me is when she intimidates a load of big Russian guys and then realizes she was wearing her daughter’s silly pink hairclips on her way out. Like, it might have been funny if there were only one or two instances like that, but the whole contrast became a constant running gag throughout the book and it just got a bit old quite quickly. And then there were ones that just didn’t seem to fit with the tone of the book. I appreciate that it must be quite hard to walk the line between an assassin/spy thriller and a new mother comedy, but there were moments where the novel was definitely shifting towards being quite dark and gritty, like when Lex had been cornered or something, only to make a joke about the smashed up rice cake mush on her gun that she desperately tried to pass off as cocaine. I think that humour kinda dragged me out of the exciting scenes when I should have been frantically turning pages instead. There were also some incredibly corny moments in the book, and I couldn’t tell if they were included to poke fun at the genre a bit or if they were genuinely considered a good idea. I did do a big cringe every time I saw the words The President, particularly as they were included in lines such as ‘The President will take over the world.’ [I don’t have the book to hand so I’m paraphrasing, but yeah, there were several of these kinds of sentences dotted throughout the book]. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are some people out there who will really love this book and find it hilariously funny, but I don’t think the humour was my thing.

I did like the idea of a book which has a new mother as a protagonist. I think it works especially well in a genre which is often so male-dominated by the likes of Bond and Bourne. It was nice to see such a change up. That being said, there are moments when the book doesn’t do much for stay at home mums. I know that it is trying to highlight how difficult motherhood is, and at times it suggests that it is sometimes harder than being an assassin, but the way it portrayed the cast of stay at home mums just didn’t work for me. Most of them are uber-glamourous ‘yummy mummies’ who run charity bake sales and dress their kids in designer clothes and push them into elite schools and they’re usually married to rich, cheating husbands. By showing them in this light, they’re portrayed as kinda vapid and elitist and with nothing better to do with their days. This contrasts pretty sharply with Lex, who balances being a mother and assassin. She, unlike them, is not bored or under the thumb of a rich, successful husband. This in turn, suggests at least on some level that being a working mother is superior to being a stay at home mum, because all of the stay at home mums are shown as conniving, shallow and bored women. Which is probably not the message Killing It wished to portray them, but that’s how it came off to me.

The characters were pretty cool. I loved Jake, and I hoped his character would be more involved than he was. Lex was a reasonably interesting character, although I wish there was some more development of her outside of her mummy/assassin career. Will might as well have not been in it. It took me several chapters to realize Lex wasn’t a single mother, and the thing that I thought he would add to the story– an added element of risk because Will can’t know what Lex does for a living, was never really a point of tension. He was essentially just an easy out for whenever Lex had to go do something, to make sure that her baby wasn’t left alone in the middle of the night or whatever. Bennie too, could have been interesting, but unless there’s a sequel, his plot threads don’t go anywhere. I liked some of the stay at home mums, as much as I could considering they’re all very shallow. Tamara was funny, as was Frankie.

The plot twists were a mixture of super predictable and a bit cliche but surprising. The first one, with the Dragon [not a spoiler, I promise] was very very obvious from the start. Fortunately, there was more to the story than that one twist. The second was much more interesting, if a bit overdone in the genre, but I liked it all the same because I wasn’t expecting it. The writing style also wasn’t my favourite, as it was very told rather than shown, particularly with Lex explaining what she was going to do before she got to it. I thought several of the scenes could have done with things being described as they were being used, rather than us being told about them. This was particularly true in the bonfire night bits, where Lex narrates about the non Toffee apples before she gets to the event and then asks Will how his non Toffee apple tastes. A lot of it could have been cut right down to us getting a description of it through Will’s dialogue or the way his face looks eating it. This kind of editing might have done a fair bit for the pacing. Considering the book is a thriller/spy novel and therefore should be quite action packed, I feel like there were big chunks where not much happened. Sure, you’ve got to have build-up, and some of the less exciting chunks were gearing up to the action scenes, but again I felt a bit underwhelmed by a spy novel that I could easily put down for several hours at a time.

Overall, I’m giving Killing It a 5/10 stars. I thought there was quite a bit of potential there, and some of the scenes were funny, and I loved the interactions between Jake and Lex, but ultimately the book was a bit slow for me and didn’t achieve what it seemed to want to do. If Mackay released another novel in the series, I might be tempted to pick it up in a library or something, but otherwise I’ll probably pass.

Has anyone else read this book or plans to? What did y’all think of the review or the book itself? I love reading your thoughts and opinions, so please feel free to share in the comment section below 😀