The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This read was a real treat. Nothing extraordinary happened in this book; I’d argue there was no real plot. But the magic of this one was in the ordinary. It was honest and humorous and highly relatable. The characters were distinct and full of their own flaws, but endearing. There was much wisdom tucked in these pages.

Readers looking for a read that ponders the mundanity of life and family and provides a slow down for all the hustle and bustle will enjoy this one.

An incredibly unique and enthralling family story that had me hooked from page one. These characters are going to stick with me for a long time.

A dysfunctional family tale told multiple ways but primarily through the eyes of Miranda, a 5o something daughter of somewhat unhinged parents who are both funny and frustrating. Her sister Charlotte pops in periodically. There are letters, emails, and other things (it might seem chaotic but that's life). This shines in the dialogue which is both snappy and funny. And despite the arguing, there's a lot of affection. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. A poignant read that members of the sandwich generation will most appreciate.

It’s always interesting when Miranda visits her eccentric parents. She acts as translator, communicating to her sister and daughter how they are.

This is story has a quiet humor to it that works and feels very realistic. The interactions are so true to unique family life. The sisters’ letters to each other about their parents reminded me of how my sister and I talk at times. It is a slow story with not much happening, but sometimes those are the best stories.

“Your parents are your parents and you don’t question what you have for dinner, or where you live, or how they talk to you; that is just the way things are. It’s when you’re older that you start to think, ‘Hey, that was a bit odd, wasn’t it?’”

The Usual Desire to Kill comes out 4/1.

Thank you Netgalley & Scribner for an eARC ♥️♥️♥️

The story's about a delightfully eccentric family living in a crazy-old house in rural France. I mean, we're talking dilapidated mansion, complete with crumbling walls, overgrown gardens, and a freezer full of food that's older than I am! It's the perfect setting for a quirky family saga.
Camilla Barnes’s humor is spot on, and the characters are so relatable, despite being totally flawed.
Miranda, the main character, is hilarious, and her commentary on her family's antics had me laughing out loud. She's the perfect narrator – witty, observant, and just a little bit sarcastic. I loved her from the get-go!🥰
And then there are her parents... oh man, they're like the ultimate quirky couple! They've been married for 50 years, and they're still going strong, despite their eccentricities. Her dad's a retired philosophy professor who never loses an argument (even when he's wrong!), and her mom's a free-spirited woman who loves to reminisce about the war (even though she was born after it ended!). They're like two peas in a pod, and their love for each other is palpable.♥️
What really got me, though, was the author's ability to show that even the weirdest families are held together by love. It's a pretty cool message, if you ask me. The author tackles some heavy themes – sibling rivalry, generational divides, long-buried secrets – but they do it with such humor and heart that you can't help but feel uplifted.💓

If you like reading about a bickering old married couple then this book is for you. The couple reminds me of my parents. I liked parts of the story, and sometimes the book tends to drag. I liked the protagonist, she had a good head on her shoulders. Quirky little novel but definitely not for readers who don’t like unlikable characters.

Thank you for the free book Scribner Books @scribnerbooks , NetGalley @netgalley and Camilla Barnes!
“The Usual Desire to Kill” by Camilla Barnes⭐️⭐️⭐️Genre: Fiction. Location: Near Poitiers, France. Time: 2019.
CAST OF CHARACTERS:
Dad (late 70s)-retired philosophy professor. Never loses an argument, loves splitting hairs to prove a point.
Mum (2 years younger)-martyr with an unmentionable hip. Likes to bring conversations back to “the War,” though she was born after it ended.
Daughter Charlotte (early 50s) lives in England conveniently far from Dad and Mum.
Daughter Miranda (not quite 50) Actress in Paris. Does the majority of visiting and coping with Dad and Mum. (“I felt I ought to want to, so I did.”).
Granddaughter Alice (not quite 20) Miranda’s daughter. The somewhat removed, astute observer.

Dad and Mum are hoarders. They have lived in a dilapidated house in rural France for 30 years with llamas, ducks, chickens, House Cats, outside Bad Cats-and a freezer of questionable food dating back to 1983. Married 50 years, they’re set in their ways. When Miranda visits, she’s stuck in the middle (“They used me not as glue, but more as translator…”), later venting to her sister and daughter: “ The usual desire to kill”.

Author Barnes has written a story about an eccentric casualty cruel family, generational divides, buried secrets. Her dialogue is clever, painfully funny-and sad. (“They had turned ‘Go without’ into an art and they were destined to hoard all their life.”) Narrator Miranda compares her mother’s martyr complex to playing tennis with St. Bartholomew (flayed alive but didn’t make a fuss about it). She thinks the whole family is on the autism spectrum. (Which doesn’t excuse their pettiness.) Barnes uses letters from teenage Mum to help us sympathize. Now, if Mum asks Miranda what she’s been up to, Miranda will be disparaged no matter how she answers. If you liked A Man Called Ove or The Royal Tenenbaums, you might like this book. For me, I recognize and appreciate Barnes’ skillful and descriptive writing, but to paraphrase Miranda: they’re all so insanely irritating! It’s 3 stars from me📚💁🏼‍♀️

The Usual Desire to Kill is a book about the interplay between family members. Miranda frequently visits her older parents in France. Her parents have been married a long time and are very set in their ways, which greatly frustrates Miranda, and she frequently vents to her sister as well as her daughter about her challenges with her parents. Over the course of the book, nuances become apparent in the relationships and long buried secrets are uncovered, but ultimately this is a pretty quiet novel with not a lot going on in it. I was quite intrigued by the summary of the book and its comparison to other works, but this one left me underwhelmed.

Thanks to Scribner via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.

There’s no one who can get on our nerves like family can. This is certainly the case with Miranda’s family in Camilla Barnes’s entertaining and layered new novel, The Usual Desire to Kill. Almost everything about Miranda’s parents drives her nuts. Her mother is a terrible communicator who constantly blames others for not doing things she forgot she didn’t actually tell them and insists on having things done her own way. Her father turns off his hearing aid so that he can ignore everyone when he wants to. Both parents engage in petty revenge and generally bring out the worst in each other. And, in spite of this and more, Miranda dutifully travels from Paris to her parents’ rural home every weekend.

I finished The Usual Desire to Kill in a single day because I was hooked on the chaos. Most of the story centers on Miranda as she and her sister try to help their parents navigate their increasingly poor health. Both of them have grown up “managing” their parents and have no little resentment about that. Their father, Peter, struggles with the illogic of people, which leads him to struggle with his anger. Plus, there’s the Incident. Miranda’s sister, Charlotte, is obsessed with finding out what Peter may or may not have done to a family friend years ago and which her parents absolutely refuse to discuss. Meanwhile, Miranda and Charlotte’s mother needs to have a second hip replacement and she’s the sort of person who needs to be cajoled and/or tricked into going to the hospital. Barnes relates all of this either through Miranda or Miranda and Charlotte’s emails to each other. The impression I got was of four people who have learned to function through triangulation, deliberate ignorance about things they’re not supposed to know, and carefully maneuvering around the parents’ feelings.

Further complicating this family portrait are letters from Miranda and Charlotte’s mother (never actually named) to her sister, Kitty, in the 1960s. “Mum” is a young woman living away from home for the first time, studying at university, when she meets two men. One of them, a sort of family friend from America, is attractive and interesting. The other is Peter, a philosophy student who instantly had me wondering if they were on the spectrum. It’s hard to believe that the hapless Peter and “Mum” will marry and have a family. These letters reveal a lot about “Mum” that explains her prickliness, things that even the most determined interrogator would never be able to get out of her because it just wouldn’t do to talk about a strict, uncaring mother or a surprise pregnancy or constant, casual sexism.

The only person in the family who isn’t constantly seething or fretting is Miranda’s daughter, Alice. Alice is the only person in the novel who seems to accept everyone just the way they are. It’s also through Alice and her relationship with her grandfather, Peter, that Barnes plays with some of the elements of King Lear to make us further contemplate what we inherit (literally and figuratively) from our ancestors.

Readers who enjoy complicated family stories will find much to enjoy in this layered and often funny novel.

40/100 or 2.0 stars

This was not what I was expecting going into this, and I found myself not being invested in any of the characters or what was going one, so I did dnf at 14%. The writing style wasn't working for me either. It wasn't bad, but it just wasn't hooking me into the story, unfortunately.

I was intrigued by the llamas on the cover, but it wasn't enough to sustain my attention. In this novel, a daughter spends time with her ever-cranky, cantankerous elderly parents in their rural home in France. She and her sister feel a sense of obligation to maintain their relationship with their parents, and yet they are clearly exasperated by them. There is a family secret that gets revealed through old letters that adds a bit of intrigue, but it was far too predictable. The twist wasn't anything new or novel.

A slice-of-life novella from the point of view of Miranda, a late-40s woman who lives in Paris and works as a theater actor. The focus is not her work, though. Instead, it’s about her weekly visit to her parents in their crumbling home in the country outside Poitiers. “The usual desire to kill” refers to the feeling she has after a day or two with her parents, who are always at odds and seem likely to have been for the 50 years of their married life. Still, I’ve always said that people’s marriages are always a mystery to everyone but the people in them, and we gradually come to learn the history and mystery of this couple and their relationship. It’s both a funny and poignant story. I did think Camilla Barnes made the parents more decrepit and dotty than those I know of their age (including myself), but otherwise I enjoyed the read.

I really enjoyed this book. The characters were silly and yet still relatable. A character-driven novel, you felt like you were in the room with this dysfunctional family and their silly antics. A quick, fun read.

The story of a long-married couple as seen through the eyes of their middle-aged daughter. Miranda spends a few days every month with her aging parents, frustrated by their constant disagreements and stubborn ways. (Her mother serves meat that has been in the freezer for years; her father takes his hearing aids out whenever he is annoyed and wants to ignore everyone.) Intercut through the present-day narrative are diary excerpts written by the mother when she was at Oxford. I liked this all the way through, but it seemed to me that it ended with no resolution or conclusion really. It was just done. Things had been revealed about the past that kind of gave an idea of why things were as they were in the present, but it still felt unfinished in a way, like not a big reveal of any kind so much as a slow release of information that petered out to an end to the book. The story was good but 3 stars overall.

4.5 ⭐️
Advance Reader Copy - Publishing 4/1/25

It’s the poetry that bubbles up.
The Usual Desire to Kill is an entertaining novel that brings us a story of aging parents and examinations of life’s resignations and what one carries.

Barnes uses varying styles to bring us the story, chronicling monthly visits by a daughter visiting her parents, who have moved from Britain to a farmhouse in the south of France, and have acquired quite the menagerie to go along with their years of scornful dissonance with each other and their offspring; while also setting scenes and giving dialogue bringing the reader right into a captive moment of stage performance brilliance. Her talents as a playwright carry this story through to a quiet, endearing close.

I felt like I had attended a small box theater production of a well written and beautifully acted character study of a slice of life. Brava to our writer and all of our characters here.

The book was a little lighter on plot than I expected and was more of a character study. I really enjoyed the parts that explored the dynamics in the family when the children start to become the caretakers of their parents. It felt like a play to me and I wasn't surprised that the author was a playwright, it had that spareness to it.

The Usual Desire To Kill was an interesting read. Little to no plot, the book was made up of mostly character driven scenes over a several month period. Miranda, a theater actress in her forties, spends a couple of days at a time with her aging parents and their many animals at their crumbling French estate. Miranda relays these visits in emails to her sister Charlotte.
While I did feel like the synopsis is a little misleading, I did end up enjoying this book. It is more of a character study of parental roles being reversed, and navigating one’s overly stubborn elderly parents.

Told mostly from the perspective of one meticulously inquisitive daughter, The Usual Desire To Kill tells the tale of one eccentric family that is set in their ways.

Reading this story was like taking a peek in to my own life when I visit my parents but there is no way that I could have written it with the same wit, humor, and precision that Barnes did. I can see myself playing the same role as Miranda plays—often times acting as the translator between my parents who lack the communication skills required to make a marriage work but have some how still managed to do just that after 40+ years.

“After more than fifty years of marriage, they were set in their ways… It was a game of stubbornness versus pedantry and it was pointless trying to intervene.”

With irresistible prose, playful dialogue, and compelling character relations, Barnes explores many facets of family life: the intricacies of marriage, parent-child relationships, sisterhood, generational gaps, and what it looks like to care for those we love. There is nary a plot so seemingly, there is little that is actually occurring on page but there is something really special about the stark reality of it all. I could absolutely see this novel being adapted as a thought-provoking, comedic play.

“It has to be said, they may be barking mad, but I always come home with some good anecdotes.”

Thank you Scribner for the early copy in exchange for an honest review! Available Apr. 1 2025. *Quotes are pulled from an advanced reader copy and are subject to change prior to publication*

The dialogue in this was great. The rest though I could not get myself to finish. I don't know if it was the story because I got about halfway through and felt like it was literally just them talking and not much else going on but this put me in a slump.

For much of the book I found this a grating reading experience. One of its characters in particular is personified so perversely, at such length and so repetitively that I nearly gave up and walked away. While Barnes is a clever, witty and occasionally moving writer, her focus on the impossible mother seems to me to have needed some stiff editorial input. The father also has his irritating traits and while this relationship is the hinge of the book, I found it excessive even in a relatively short work.
In other words, there’s much too much set up and not enough of the more intense and emotionally affecting material that comes in a rush at the end. As a result, I found it hard to care for anyone much. Maybe excepting the ducks.