Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
Four Aunties and a Wedding is the follow up to Jesse Q. Sutanto’s hilariously over-the-top 2021-release, Dial A for Aunties.
In this second installment, Meddy and her fantastic Ma and Aunties are back, doing what they do best; getting into trouble, causing chaos and steadfastly supporting one another through it all.
Meddy’s Ma and Aunties are wedding planner extraordinaires, but when it’s Meddy’s turn to take the walk down the aisle, she wants them to attend as her most valued guests, not as the planners.
Therefore, they decide to hire out the jobs they would normally handle. They’re pleasantly surprised when they are able to find another Chinese-Indonesian family-run wedding planning business to help them. What are the odds?
Meddy can’t believe her luck. That is until she catches the wedding photographer, Staphanie, who she has grown close to over the months of planning, discussing taking a hit out on someone at the blessed event.
Oh yeah, this seems more like Meddy’s luck; terrible. As it turns out, the whole family of wedding planners they hired are part of the Mafia and plan to use Meddy’s wedding as the backdrop to their next assassination, but who is their target?
Now it is up to Meddy, her Ma and Aunties to protect all of their guests, while simultaneously taking the mafioso down and keeping everyone else, including the groom, in the dark.
If this sounds like the wackiest set-up to you, you’re not wrong. It is wacky, wildly outrageous and an absolute blast to read!
I love Meddy and her relationships with her family, especially with her Ma.
All the Aunties and Ma love Meddy so much, she’s almost drowning in their support. Sometimes their best intentions overshoot the mark a bit, but what are families for, if not to embarrass you every now and again.
This had some adorably played out drama, however, I will say that I wished there had been a bit more mystery to it. I know it isn’t necessarily a Cozy Mystery, but it feels like it wants to be.
There’s so much about this to love, but I didn’t really feel like their were any stakes involved. I know there was the hit they were preventing but, that almost seemed back burner compared to the slapstick hijinks.
With this said, I still found this to be super cute and fun. For me, this is the ideal type of book to bring on vacation, or to binge in a weekend when you want to forget about real life for a while.
I love these characters so much and hope there’s more to this series. From the ending of this one, it sounds like there definitely could be. I would 100% be on board.
Thank you to the publisher, Berkley Books, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I’m definitely a Sutanto fan!!