Dial A for Aunties. Jesse Q. Sutanto. 2021. 299 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: There is a curse in my family. It’s followed us all the way from China, where it took my great-grandfather (freak accident on the farm that involved a pregnant sow and an unfortunately placed rake), to Indonesia, where it claimed my grandfather (a stroke at the age of thirty, nothing quite so dramatic as great-grandfather’s demise but still rather upsetting.) My mom and aunts figured that a Chinese curse wouldn’t follow them to the West, so after they all got married, they moved to San Gabriel, California. But not only did the curse find them, it mutated. Instead of killing the men in my family, it made them leave, which is so much worse.
Premise/plot: Meddelin Chan is a wedding photographer in her family’s wedding business. (Don’t leave your big day to chance, leave to the Chans!) The novel opens with her family setting her up on a blind date. Well, an arranged date. I believe it is her mom who has been chatting up a guy on a dating app pretending to be Meddelin. Surprise, you’re meeting tonight after months of texting/chatting. The date goes horribly wrong almost from the start. It ends in disaster. Literally. It will take a whole family to get Meddelin out of this mess….but are they up for the job?
The family has a BIG, BIG, BIG wedding–on an island–the next day. On this island, Meddelin will bump into her old college boyfriend…Nathan. The wedding is a huge disaster… can anything good come from this weekend???
My thoughts: This book has a weird/odd sense of humor. It is definitely a slapstick style comedy….but with a dead body as a prop for most of the novel. It is not a murder mystery. (No mystery to it). It isn’t really seen as a grave situation (pun intended) but rather an over-the-top slapstick comedy.
It features flashbacks. I liked some of them. But the flashbacks definitely added some graphic-ness to this one. Definitely not clean. But I personally think it was sneakily done. The first half (or perhaps first third) is relatively clean, no obvious red flags. Then BOOM it is a graphic romance novel–in flashback form. By this point I was hooked enough to *need* to keep reading. But I felt bad about it. (Not a win-win situation).
The jacket flap is all about “four aunties” this and that. But NONE of the aunts had names–just numbers. The first aunt, I believe, was called Big Aunt, but the rest were just numbers. And I *think* though I’m not positive that Meddelin’s own mother was one of the four aunts. Which is just weird that she’s lumped in as an auntie. Yes, she’s a sister. But she’s not Meddelin’s auntie. I suppose it is possible that there was a mother + 4 aunties. It really BOTHERED me that the aunts did not have names.
This one just wasn’t my personal ‘cup of tea’ if you will. My sense of humor did not align with the book’s sense of humor.
© 2023 Becky Laney of Becky’s Book Reviews
