Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Sutanto

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Sutanto is the freshly published sequel to the award-winning Dial A For Aunties: the Auties are back, and this time it’s Meddy’s wedding that’s on the brink of chaos.

After bonding over the corpse-hiding shenanigans of the first book, Nathan and Meddy are getting married. Okay, so her aunties and her almost-in-laws do not have the smoothest introduction, and her auntie’s wedding outfits may not be entirely what is usual for a posh wedding in Oxford, and her Chinese Indonesian Wedding Planners might actually be mafia and are using her wedding to carry out a hit, but it’s still her wedding day and Meddy is going to make it run smoothly.

I was a bit on the fence about Dial A For Aunties – although I loved some aspects of it, I felt like the serious parts and the absurd parts didn’t quite gel together well enough. To begin with, Four Aunties and a Wedding felt like more of the same: mirthful rather than funny, a tad repetitive (how many times can a girl worry about the same problem in the text?), and with some additional “that’s not how things would go in real life” details that are necessary to allow the plot.

However, Sutanto has chosen to dial it up to eleven and once everything gets going – and once the wedding day arrives – it is so much fun. I am a sucker for stories with slightly hapless protagonists trying to navigate a gang of wacky relatives anyway, and this is exactly the kind of thing I want. I liked the aunties in the first book, but I loved them here.

It’s not just that this is terrific fun, it’s also a really well-observed portrait of the push and pull of close family – yes, they annoy each other, but they’ve also got each others’ backs, whatever happens. There is so much love and joy in this book – with something so deliberately over the top it would be so easy for it to feel mocking, or like caricature, but it doesn’t.

So, yes, I enjoyed it. Although this is the second book in this series, I don’t think you’ll have a problem reading it if you haven’t read the first – although you will obviously encounter spoilers for that one. If you’re after a lighthearted, ridiculously OTT read – especially one that isn’t about a romantic relationship – Four Aunties And A Wedding may be your thing.