Four Aunties and a Wedding

Jesse Q Sutanto’s newest book, Four Aunties and a Wedding, is the sequel to dark comedy Dial A For Aunties.

I can’t imagine this would make any sense without reading Dial A For Aunties. My review is here, but the short summary is that you should go read it and laugh hysterically.  When Four Aunties and A Wedding opens, Meddy and Nathan are planning their destination wedding in the UK, but although the aunties do weddings themselves, they want to be guests and not wedding vendors. So they meet with a weirdly symmetrical Indo family who also do weddings, also have misspelled names and punny ads, and, as it turns out, also have a dark secret, and one implausible lie leads to another until chaos ensues at the gorgeous British wedding.

Look, it’s not as good as Dial A For Aunties. Some of it’s just the lightning-in-a-bottle perfection of the first one. An accidental murder, with overbearing, well-meaning aunties doing their nosy best to help? Just genius. Some of it, though, is that the overall zaniness of the sequel veers from a dark comedy into no-stakes insanity. There’s no point where a reader worries that Meddy — or any of the Chans, really — could possibly face repercussions for any of the wild things that happen in this book. There’s no worry that maybe someone won’t swallow the increasingly ridiculous lies, no worry that Nathan’s British parents will hold a grudge against the increasingly ridiculous antics of the aunties, no worry that the planned mob hit at the wedding will actually come off. It’s 0% tension, 100% capers.

So, you’ve got to be in the right mood for Four Aunties and A Wedding. Be ready for over-the-top zaniness on every single page, with our favorite aunties characters in their wedding best, down to dragons on their hats. Because upscale British ladies love hats, right? It’s only polite! The aunties have studied British English from oddly cheap online lessons, and insist upon using ridiculous British slang whenever possible.  And that’s just the very beginning of this story of mafia threats, attempted murder, successful kidnapping, blackmail, and other wedding-day zaniness.

Four Aunties and a Wedding  is written by Jesse Q Sutanto and will be published by Berkley on March 29, 2022. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are my own, as always.