Dial A for Aunties

The Setup

Meddy Chan’s love life is a disaster zone managed by four women — her mother and three aunties — who have opinions about everything and are not shy about sharing them. When a blind date her mother arranged ends in accidental manslaughter (a stun gun, a car, a tragic miscalculation), Meddy calls the only people she trusts with a body disposal problem.

The aunties arrive immediately, in full problem-solving mode. The body goes in the car trunk. The wedding Meddy is there to photograph proceeds. Her aunties circulate through the event managing a logistical crisis with the same energy they bring to arguing about mahjong. And her ex-boyfriend — the wedding planner — is there, looking unfairly attractive, and they need to talk.

This is the premise of Dial A for Aunties, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s debut novel, and it delivers exactly what it promises: a joyful, escalating romantic comedy that uses the corpse as a MacGuffin for a story about family, pressure, love, and the particular dynamics of Chinese-Indonesian immigrant households.

Why the Comedy Works

The key to making comedy like this work is commitment: the characters must take the situation completely seriously, even as the reader recognises its absurdity. Sutanto nails this. The aunties do not think hiding a body at a luxury wedding is funny; they think it is a practical problem requiring practical solutions, and they approach it with the full force of the organisational intelligence they bring to every other problem in their lives.

This commitment is what distinguishes Meddy’s aunties from stock comedy characters. Each of them has a clear personality — Auntie Four is the glamorous one; Auntie Three is the most emotionally manipulative; Auntie Two is the most capable; Mama is the most anxious — and each character’s response to the crisis is consistent with who they are. The comedy comes from their distinctiveness in interaction, not from random absurdity.

The Family as Subject

Sutanto is interested in the specific dynamics of her family’s cultural background — Chinese-Indonesian immigrant community in California — and treats those dynamics with specificity rather than using them as exotic backdrop. The parental pressure, the family loyalty, the aunties’ involvement in every aspect of Meddy’s life: these are rendered with the warmth of someone who knows this world from inside.

The novel’s underlying emotional current is about belonging and expectation — Meddy’s relationship with the family business (event photography), with her aunties’ ambitions for her romantic life, with her ex-boyfriend Nathan and what their history actually means. These elements are handled lightly but genuinely, giving the comedy some emotional grounding.

Nathan and the Romance

The romantic subplot involves Meddy’s ex-boyfriend Nathan, who is not only at the wedding but actively helping with it. Their history — why they broke up, what they actually felt, what has changed — unfolds alongside the corpse-management plot in a way that manages the dual demands with reasonable skill. Nathan is charming without being idealised, and his chemistry with Meddy is sufficient to make the romantic outcome feel earned rather than obligatory.

The ex-boyfriend-at-the-wedding is a well-worn romantic comedy structure, and Sutanto doesn’t revolutionise it — she just executes it competently while surrounding it with more entertaining noise than the structure usually gets.

The Pacing

Dial A for Aunties moves quickly. This is both a feature and a minor limitation: the pace keeps the comedy energetic and the book from overstaying its welcome, but it also means that some of the emotional moments don’t have space to breathe. Readers who want a romantic comedy with more contemplative passages will find this novel more exhausting than refreshing.

For readers who want to laugh while being slightly stressed by fictional characters’ predicament, it’s exactly right.

An Infectiously Good Time

Dial A for Aunties is not trying to do more than it does, and it succeeds fully at what it attempts. It is a warm, fast, genuinely funny romantic comedy that has more authentic cultural specificity and better-developed supporting characters than most of its genre peers. The aunties alone are worth the book.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A hilarious, warm debut that stacks misfortune with perfect comic timing. The aunties steal every scene they’re in, which is most of them.