Book Review | Dial A For Aunties @HQstories

I was in need of something fun to read this week and it came in the shape of Dial A for Aunties.

Dial A For Aunties
Jesse Q. Sutanto

1 (accidental) murder
2 thousand wedding guests
3 (maybe) cursed generations
4 meddling Asian aunties to the rescue!

Wedding photographer Meddy Chan has always wanted to make her overbearing family happy. And there’s nothing they want more than to see Meddy happily married.

But when Meddy accidentally kills her blind date that they set her up on, she calls her meddlesome aunties to help her. Although hiding a dead body is going to be harder than they thought, especially when their family business has its biggest event yet – and at a hotel that just happens to be managed by Meddy’s ex boyfriend, Nathan, aka the one that got away.

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This really was such a fun reading experience, you know when you find a book that just makes you laugh at all the absurdities well Dial A for Aunties is that book. It just had all the right elements to make it a loveable, hilarious and gripping read.

It’s the kind of story that makes me feel like I want to tell you all the funny bits where I was actually laughing out loud so that we can share in how amusing it was together but, of course, I also don’t want to spoil the book for you either. What I will say is that even though there is a murder at the heart of this story rest assured it doesn’t take itself too seriously and you will soon be pulled into the antics and misadventure of Meddy, her mum and her aunties.

I loved learning about Meddy’s Chinese and Indonesian heritage and how she is constantly juggling who she wants to be against making her family proud. I can’t say too much about it but her romantic entanglements feel like they are all doomed which makes it quite funny but also makes you really on her side and hoping that she will get through everything kind of unscathed. The growth that Meddy has as a character is fascinating, she starts out as a kind of unwitting wrong place wrong time character and ends up managing to manipulate situations to her advantage, but in a kind of unlikely way, which makes her even more loveable.

Her mum and the aunts were hilarious and I loved their bickering and one-upmanship with each other because at the end of the day the reader knows that they would really do anything for each other. Even though they were mostly known by their place in the family rather than by name, their personalities really shone through and it always made me smile how unpredictable they would be, they never reacted the way I expected.

If you are looking for a funny and unexpected story with loveable characters that find themselves in an outrageous situation then you’ll love Dial A for Aunties.

Jesse Q Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore and sees both cities as her homes. She has a Masters degree from Oxford University, though she has yet to figure out a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious. She is currently living back in Jakarta on the same street as her parents and about seven hundred meddlesome aunties. When she’s not tearing out her hair over her latest WIP, she spends her time baking and playing FPS games. Oh, and also being a mom to her two kids.

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