Book Title: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE AUNTIES Character Name: Meddy Chan   How would you describe your family or your childhood? Bizarre. I basically had four mom figures, each one vying for power and attention.   What was your greatest talent? Navigating a path to peace among my constantly bickering mother and aunts.   Significant other? Nathan Chan, my luscious, long-suffering husband.   Biggest challenge in relationships? Probably the meddling from my mother and aunts.   Where do you live? Los Angeles.   Do you have any enemies? Myself. Also the family of the guy I accidentally killed.   How do you feel about the place where you are now? Is there something you are particularly attached to, or particularly repelled by, in this place? I feel happy and also annoyed at the same time because I live so close to my mom and aunts.   Do you have children, pets, both, or neither? Neither.   What do you do for a living? Photographer.   Greatest disappointment? Losing Nathan in college.   Greatest source of joy? Finding Nathan again in my mid-twenties.   What do you do to entertain yourself or have fun? Good question. I am driven…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Jesse Q. Sutanto!   Writes: Comedic murder books with a lot of heart, humor, and hijinks.   About this book: 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…

Danielle Jackson: Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Jesse! We are big fans of your Aunties series and are so excited to celebrate the release of FOUR AUNTIES AND A WEDDING – congrats! What has been the most surprising thing about your publishing journey so far?   Jesse Q. Sutanto:  Oh gosh, to be honest, EVERYTHING has been surprising about my publishing journey! My first book deal, THE OBSESSION, was a humble deal. Everything was about as typical as it went. My second book deal, THEO TAN AND THE FOX SPIRIT, was slightly larger, but still pretty average. Then the following month I sold DIAL A FOR AUNTIES and things just exploded. Suddenly, I was having calls with producers and giant studios, all of whom were clamoring to buy the rights to the TV/film adaptation. It was the kind of story where, if an aspiring author were to say she dreams of having that kind of road to publication, she’d be laughed out of the room because it’s just so ridiculous!   Wedding planning is already a feat, but with her vivacious and nosy aunties “helping,” things quickly get out of hand for Meddy. Were there any aspects of wedding planning and…

How can I describe the chaos that is a dim sum restaurant in the heart of San Gabriel Valley at 11 a.m.? The place is filled with close to a hundred round tables, each one occupied by a different family, many of them with three to four generations of people present—there are gray-haired, prune-faced Ah Mas holding chubby babies on their laps. Steaming carts are pushed by the waitresses, though if you called them “Waitress” they’d never stop for you. You must call them Ah Yi—Auntie—and wave frantically as they walk by to get them to stop. And once they do, customers descend like vultures and fight over the bamboo steamers inside the cart. People shout, asking if they’ve got siu mai, or har gow, or lo mai gai, and the Ah Yis locate the right dishes somewhere in the depths of their carts. My Mandarin is awful, and my Cantonese nonexistent. Ma and the aunts often try to help me improve by speaking to me in either Mandarin or Indonesian, but then give up and switch to English because I only get about 50 percent of what they’re saying. Their grasp of the English language is a bit wobbly,…