Keep your friends close and these four aunties closer.
Another wild wedding day befalls the Chan family in Sutanto’s wacky sequel to Dial A for Aunties (2021).
Almost a year after Meddy Chan and her four aunties covered up an accidental murder, Meddy can’t wait to have a fresh start by marrying her dream guy, Nathan, at Oxford's Christ Church College. He’s the “perfect specimen of a man” according to her Ma, yet even with their wedding day rapidly approaching, Meddy can’t help but feel like their union is too good to be true. To make matters worse, her “batty” aunties have yet to meet Nathan’s prim-and-proper English parents, and they’ve started using British slang like “dog’s bollocks” in hopes of impressing Chris and Annie. To further appease Meddy’s wedding jitters, her aunties hire the Tanuwijayas, an Indonesian family of wedding vendors who handle flowers, hair, makeup, and photography—score! Meddy finds a kindred spirit in photographer Staphanie, and they become fast friends after bonding over misspelled names and pepper spray. Their friendship proves to be short-lived, however, when Meddy overhears a phone conversation in which Staphanie agrees to take someone out…and not as a plus one. It turns out Staph and her family are in the organized crime business, and their next target happens to be a guest at the Chan wedding. When Staphanie threatens to expose last year’s accident to the police, Meddy and her aunties embark on a madcap, Sopranos-style series of hijinks in order to stop the Tanuwijayas’ plan in its tracks. With plenty of weed-spiked champagne and gags made of pantyhose, these four aunties make it known: Don’t mess with the Chan family. Sutanto’s sequel doubles the trouble for Meddy and Co., but it is not without some frustrating moments (Meddy is basically MIA for her entire wedding). Despite the continual shenanigans, you can't help but get a kick out of the aunties' outrageous stunts and their even bigger hearts.
Keep your friends close and these four aunties closer.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44076-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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