Dial A for Aunties
This book is a hilarious, entertaining romp. It won the second-highest number of votes in Goodreads Readers Choice for Fiction in 2021.
As a novel, it’s a bit hard to categorize: an early reviewer said, “Wrap a rom-com with a crime novel, sprinkle in Weekend at Bernie’s, and you get this deliciously fun, bighearted book.” That about sums it up.
The lead character, Meddelin Chan, is a California wedding photographer who lives with her Chinese-Indonesian mother and three aunts. They think she needs a husband, so they set her up with a blind date. But, during the date, she accidentally kills him. So she calls on the aunties to help her hide the body.
The five of them – the four “aunties”and Meddy—run a wedding planning business, and they’ve been hired to manage a special wedding at an exclusive resort on a small island off California. The bride is the daughter of an important and wealthy Indonesian family. The groom is Tom Cruise—Tom Cruise Sutopo, that is: the son of an equally wealthy Indonesian family. There will be thousands of guests. This wedding could make or break their wedding planning business. Nothing must go wrong!
For reasons that make sense at the time, Meddy and her aunties take the dead body to the island with them in a cooler. And just to complicate things further, the resort manager turns out to be Nathan, Meddy’s college boyfriend— the one Meddy never told the aunties about.
The book is organized in three parts; the subtitles help give a flavour of the author’s style.
Part 1: Girl Meets Boy (There might be insta-love and also someone might die. We’ll see.)
Part 2: Girl Finds Boy (Under very awkward circumstances.)
Part 3: Girl Gets Boy (Or tries to, anyway. It’s tricky because there’s a corpse and everything.)
The book has been called a cross-cultural comedy, and compared to the film Crazy Rich Asians. So it’s no surprise that Netflix is reportedly working on a move adaptation.
This was Jesse Sutanto’s debut adult novel in April 2021 (though she’d already published a Young Adult novel, The Obsession). She calls the novel a “love letter to her family” —her background is similar to Meddelin’s. Previous generations in her family left China for Indonesia; Jesse’s generation of cousins were sent to school in Hong Kong, where English became their main language. Jesse grew up shuttling back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore, and to the UK for university. She has a masters degree in creative writing from Oxford. (She says she “has yet to figure out how to say that without sounding obnoxious.”)
In 2022, she published a second in the “Aunties” series: Four Aunties and a Wedding. She has also published novels for young adults and middle-school readers.
She lives in Jakarta, not far from many of her forty-two first cousins and thirty aunties and uncles. When she’s not writing, she says she’s gaming with her husband or making a mess in the kitchen with her two daughters.
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