Book Review | Four Aunties and a Wedding

Needed a bit of fun with my reading over the weekend, so a romantic comedy was definitely on the cards.

Four Aunties and a Wedding
Jesse Q. Sutanto

The aunties are back, fiercer than ever and ready to handle any catastrophe–even the mafia–in this delightful and hilarious sequel by Jesse Q. Sutanto, author of Dial A for Aunties.

Meddy Chan has been to countless weddings, but she never imagined how her own would turn out. Now the day has arrived, and she can’t wait to marry her college sweetheart, Nathan. Instead of having Ma and the aunts cater to her wedding, Meddy wants them to enjoy the day as guests. As a compromise, they find the perfect wedding vendors: a Chinese-Indonesian family-run company just like theirs. Meddy is hesitant at first, but she hits it off right away with the wedding photographer, Staphanie, who reminds Meddy of herself, down to the unfortunately misspelled name.

Meddy realizes that is where their similarities end, however, when she overhears Staphanie talking about taking out a target. It turns out Staphanie and her family are The Family–actual mafia, and they’re using Meddy’s wedding as a chance to take out a target. Her aunties and mother won’t let Meddy’s wedding ceremony become a murder scene–over their dead bodies–and will do whatever it takes to save her special day, even if it means taking on the mafia.

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I really enjoyed the first book in this series, Dial A For Aunties, and was looking forward to catching up with Meddy, her mum, and her aunts, and delving into some entertaining reading. Right away I remembered how much I love this family, how they like to meddle in each other’s lives and how the aunts always want to outdo each other.

I was pretty certain that this book would be just as much fun as its prequel and it certainly started out feeling like it was going to live up to my expectations of a lot of hilarity caused by many unbelievable antics, especially when the aunties get involved. I have to say though whilst this was still fun and enjoyable, the balance just wasn’t quite right in this book, and I think if I’m being honest it is the setting that did it.

A lot of the scenes involved Meddy being almost absent from her wedding day and nobody seeming to notice, for me it meant that even the scenes that could be funny felt tinged with an overarching sadness. It also didn’t feel quite as natural as the last book, there were a few antics that actually I feel could have been left out because it was getting a bit too much, instead of relying on the aunties to bring the comedy to the situation, I felt like they were the comedy and it didn’t quite work in the same way.

As I said I still did enjoy this book but I think I was just a bit disappointed because there were so many interesting dynamics already in the story that I feel could have been used rather than resorting to such an outlandish story. I know this because as we started to find out more about why the mafia wanted to infiltrate Meddy and Nathan’s wedding I started to feel a lot more invested, I felt like I was finally seeing the characters that I loved from the first book once again.

There was still a lot of entertainment to be had from this book, even though it didn’t quite meet my expectations, I’m sure that it will provide many a giggle to other readers.