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Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Source: Borrowed
Hardcover, 352 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto is just what you would expect it to be, especially given that fantastic cover. Vera Wong gets up at 4 a.m. every morning to start her day with texts to her adult son, Tilly, and to have her brisk walk before opening her “world famous” teahouse for business in San Francisco’s Chinatown. There are only two things wrong, she has just one customer, and the sign above the teahouse might just be misrepresenting the establishment as “Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse.” Her son, Tilbert, is less than pleased by this, but since she has few customers, he believes the likelihood that his mother will be sued by the real Vera Wang are small to none.

One morning, Vera finds a dead body in her teahouse, and because the police don’t provide her with the respect she believes she is due and don’t seem concerned with the murder, she takes it upon herself to investigate — complete with her little notebook of suspects.

“Vera’s murder investigation is going so well that she wonders why more people don’t just decide to leave their boring desk jobs and go into detective work. She’s started daydreaming of having the huge VERA WANG’S WORLD-FAMOUS TEAHOUSE sign taken down and replace with VERA WANG: PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.” (pg. 85)

Her son, Tilly, is a lawyer, but since he rarely keeps in touch, he’s mostly unaware of Vera’s investigation, until of course she starts asking him some very specific hypothetical questions about evidence tampering. Along the way, she begins offering advice to all kinds of potential suspects in the Marshall Chen murder. Sana, Riki, Oliver, Julia, and Emma begin to circle in Vera’s orbit as the search for the killer continues, even as Officer Gray insists that Vera stay out of it.

Like Sutanto’s other books, you are in for a wild ride with some crazy antics. But you will love Vera Wong — she’s a mother/grandmother in search of purpose and with this group, she has a lot of work to do, including solving a murder. I highly recommend Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto. If you read Aunties, you will love this one.

RATING: Cinquain

Other Reviews:

About the Author:

Jesse Q Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore and sees both cities as her homes. She has a Masters degree from Oxford University, though she has yet to figure out a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious. She is currently living back in Jakarta on the same street as her parents and about seven hundred meddlesome aunties. When she’s not tearing out her hair over her latest WIP, she spends her time baking and playing FPS games. Oh, and also being a mom to her two kids.

Mailbox Monday #745

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto from the library.

Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to.

Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing—a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer.

What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?

The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell for my birthday from my mom.

On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend.

One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the Dark Place, the dense forest is the writer’s favorite place for long walks and it’s on one such walk that she stumbles upon a mysterious note that simply reads, “DIG HERE.”

Could this be a clue towards what has happened to the missing young couple? And what exactly is buried in this haunted ground?

“Utterly gripping with richly drawn, hugely compelling characters, this is a first-class thriller with heart” (Lucy Foley, New York Times bestselling author) that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

What did you receive?

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Source: public library
Hardcover, 304 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto bring the aunties together with Meddy, Nathan, and Nathan’s family. The wedding plans are under way and it’s a destination wedding to Oxford, England. For some reason I went into this sequel just assuming there would be another murder. Not sure why, perhaps it was the description and the mention of the mafia.

This wedding is being planned down to the minute details, but one choice could have her wedding on the cover of the news. As Meddy gets closer to her own wedding photographer, Staphanie, and her family, similarities emerge between their immigration stories and how they interact with each other and the world around them. Meddy feels a kinship to Staph (unfortunate name, indeed), but what she find outs could upend not only her new friendship, but also the entire wedding.

“Toodle pip, cheerio!”

I turn to Nathan in a panic. “I think she’s having a stroke.”

Sutanto has a gift for comedy. Her over-the-top story lines are a bit unbelievable, but her comedic timing keeps readers turning the pages. When Meddy’s aunts adopt a British accent on the plan to the destination wedding, you can just imagine what kinds of slip ups and misunderstandings are going to happen with Nathan’s uptight, unsuspecting parents. I love all of these characters from the blood thirsty aunties to the bumbling and naive Meddy. Nathan is even lovable in all his forgiving glory.

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto is another entertaining read with a crazy cast of characters. I definitely recommend reading these books in order. You want some laughs, Sutanto is your author. I laughed out loud so many times reading this, my husband thought I was losing it.

RATING: Quatrain

Other reviews:

About the Author:

Jesse Q Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore and sees both cities as her homes. She has a Masters degree from Oxford University, though she has yet to figure out a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious. She is currently living back in Jakarta on the same street as her parents and about seven hundred meddlesome aunties. When she’s not tearing out her hair over her latest WIP, she spends her time baking and playing FPS games. Oh, and also being a mom to her two kids.

Mailbox Monday #727

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Flare Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey, which I purchased.

Against a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’sFlare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.

Gailey deftly juxtaposes odd solar and weather events with the medical disasters occurring inside her own brain and body— we follow her through a false-alarm terminal cancer diagnosis, a real diagnosis of MS, and finally the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The solar flare and corona of an eclipse becomes the neural lesions in her own personal “flare,” which she probes with both honesty and humor. While the collection features harbingers of calamity, visitations of wolves, blood moons, apocalypses, and plagues, at the center of it all are the poet’s attempts to navigate a fraught medical system, dealing with a series of challenging medical revelations, some of which are mirages and others that are all too real.

In Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey is incandescent and tender-hearted, gracefully insistent on teaching us all of the ways that we can live, all of the ways in which we can refuse to do anything but to brilliantly and stubbornly survive.

Bargaining with the Fall by Alison Palmer, which I purchased.

A father’s accidental death propels a journey through loss & grieving for poet Alison Palmer.

“Where do you find painlessness,” Alison Palmer asks in the opening line of her new poetry collection written in response to the accidental fall that first paralyzed her father, and ultimately killed him. It’s a question nearly all of us will ask eventually. Death being a universal experience, it’s the rare poet who can find a way to write of grief in an original way; but Palmer is that rare poet, and as we accompany her through her process of losing her father, we feel not only her specific loss, but the cavernous absence that results from every death. A man for whom “gravity / used to be your passion” is reduced to “Hospital / Creature, Room 802” (as we learn the meaning of “tetraplegia”); and then is reduced further to ashes that she wishes she could “form back into limbs that work.” “I failed / to save the whole of you,” she laments; but really, she does save him, for he lives vividly in her verse. There is a crushing moment when she recalls her favorite photo with him, “our foreheads / press together,” a gesture repeated near the end of his life when he asks her to “Put your head on mine, the only place left you can feel.” “I’m mostly made of bruises” she says at the close. So are we all, once life is done with us – that is, if we have been fortunate enough to be grazed by love, and its loss.

“In this beautiful book, Alison Palmer bargains not only with the fall that caused her father’s paralysis and subsequent death–wishing, dreaming, denying–but also with the vicissitudes of grief itself, ‘rationing out reality in doses.’ In poems of intimate address, she finds a wealth of image and metaphor to evoke her lost father: he is ‘part of the woven sun,’ or stars, or moon; he is ashes, and the box that contains them; he is ‘the smallest ship in the rain.’ And she? “Remember how I keep you human,” she says, and she does, with these heartbreaking poems.”–Martha Collins, author of Casualty Reports

“If Hamlet had not loved his father, there would have been no tragedy. What makes death so terrifying is the way it cuts off our access to the person it takes from us, leaving us only the supernatural or the imagination through which to maintain that connection between the living and the gone. Alison Palmer’s search for solace takes the form of elegiac poems, visitations with her father’s memory as well as conversations with and about ‘the cheating god who / dismantled you.’ Summoning all the powers of language, this poet journeys into the dark caverns of mortality and sets even the bees to mourning. It is a courageous, lyrical, moving collection; one that refuses to surrender to loss.”–D.A. Powell, author of Repast: Tea, Lunch & Cocktails

“‘We let / the deep of a darker laughter pretend to be / the kind of god we seek,’ writes Alison Palmer in her new collection, Bargaining with the Fall, inferring the tattered ribbons we stitch together to cover unfathomable grief provides only momentary comfort. Bodies shut down, drift away, reduce to ashes, and what’s left– ‘flakes of scalp in your brush,’ lock boxes with missing keys, ‘bitsy insides of honeysuckle’–must be the heavy remnants that compel us onward, a sort of patchwork identity borne out of absence. These poems–lyrical, inventive, spare–remind us that while ‘faith in the body owes us nothing,’ grief is a negotiation not with what is lost, but with who we must become. We unravel, certainly, but we also spill into something new, into something we have never been before. Palmer shows us we are never too far from being lifted into ‘silver fountains,’ into ‘creeks that rise like open palms,’ into the air of a ‘hundred thousand / wings too small for true sorrow.'”–Nils Michals, author of Gembox

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto, borrowed from the library.

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. Horrified, Meddy can’t believe Staphanie and her family aren’t just like her own, they are The Family—actual mafia, and they’re using Meddy’s wedding as a chance to conduct shady business. 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.

What did you receive?

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Source: Public Library
Hardcover, 320 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto, was my work’s book club pick for March, is a coming of age story that takes a long trip off the rails of normal living. Meddelin Chan is an Indo-Chinese-American whose mother and aunties who can be a little stifling and over-bearing. This leaves her little room to be herself until she gets to live on a college campus and she meets the man of her dreams, Nathan.

SPOILER ALERT: Okay, Nathan would be the man of anyone’s dreams because honestly, he loves her no matter who she’s killed or what kind of trouble she gets into. That’s amazing to me. END SPOILER

When she returns from school after making a monumental life decision with little thought other than about a family curse and her familial obligations, the wedding business gets into full swing with her mother as a florist, her aunts as entertainment, makeup, and baker, and herself as the photographer. They are successful at this line of work, but Meddy is still not dating (ignore that 3 yr. relationship in college that her family knew nothing about).

This is where things go awry for Meddy. Her blind date is a horror show and the rest of the book from here is so over-the-top and ridiculous, it makes you want to cry with laughter. It’s definitely a comedy and not a serious murder mystery.

“I’m stuck in a nightmare. I know it. Maybe I got a concussion from the accident. Maybe I’m actually in a coma, and my coma-brain is coming up with this weird-ass scenario, because there is no way I’m actually sitting here, in the kitchen, watching my oldest aunties eat a mango and Ma and Fourth Aunt argue while Jake lies cooling in the trunk of my car.” (pg. 62)

The narrative style makes this relatable because Meddy is doing the talking and giving us all the ins-and-outs along the way, and the plot is just hilarious misstep after hilarious misstep. What bothered me and kept me from giving it a Quatrain rating was that it went a little too far with the over-the-top plotting. It was no longer believable to me in how the murder was resolved and wrapped up. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto is a fun ride, and there happens to be a sequel. It’s definitely a book that will lighten your spirits even if there is a death involved.

RATING: Tercet and a half.

About the Author:

Jesse Q Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore and sees both cities as her homes. She has a Masters degree from Oxford University, though she has yet to figure out a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious. She is currently living back in Jakarta on the same street as her parents and about seven hundred meddlesome aunties. When she’s not tearing out her hair over her latest WIP, she spends her time baking and playing FPS games. Oh, and also being a mom to her two kids.

Mailbox Monday #724

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories by Walter Weinschenk for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer, and musician. Until a few years ago, he wrote short stories exclusively but now divides his time equally between poetry and prose. Walter’s writing has appeared in a number of literary publications including The Carolina Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Cathexis Northwest Press, Meniscus Literary Journal, The Banyan Review, and Sand Hills Literary Magazine. Walter lives in a suburb just outside Washington, D.C. More of Walter’s writing can be found at walterweinschenk.com.

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto from the library for my work’s book club.

When Meddelin Chan ends up accidentally killing her blind date, her meddlesome mother calls for her even more meddlesome aunties to help get rid of the body. Unfortunately, a dead body proves to be a lot more challenging to dispose of than one might anticipate, especially when it is inadvertently shipped in a cake cooler to the over-the-top billionaire wedding Meddy, her Ma, and aunties are working at an island resort on the California coastline. It’s the biggest job yet for the family wedding business—”Don’t leave your big day to chance, leave it to the Chans!”—and nothing, not even an unsavory corpse, will get in the way of her auntie’s perfect buttercream flowers.

But things go from inconvenient to downright torturous when Meddy’s great college love—and biggest heartbreak—makes a surprise appearance amid the wedding chaos. Is it possible to escape murder charges, charm her ex back into her life, and pull off a stunning wedding all in one weekend?

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor from Hoopla for the 12 friends, 12 books challenge.

An alien artifact turns a young girl into Death’s adopted daughter in Remote Control, a thrilling sci-fi tale of community and female empowerment from Nebula and Hugo Award-winner Nnedi Okorafor

Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award

“Narrator Adjoa Andoh captivates listeners with a stunning new sci-fi novella set in a near-future Ghana. Andoh is perfectly in tune with Okorafor’s compelling story, smoothly switching between her British accent as the narrator and the intonations of the vibrant characters she brings to life.” (AudioFile magazine)

“She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.”

The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa ­­- a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks – alone, except for her fox companion – searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

What did you receive?