Four Aunties and a Wedding

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto, 287 pages

It's a year after Meddy, her mother, and her three overbearing aunties Weekend-at-Bernie's-ed their way through a huge wedding, and now Meddy is staring down the barrel of her own nuptials, which are set to take place in England, home of Meddy's posh soon-to-be in-laws. To be fully prepped for the wedding, the aunties have made sure to take British slang lessons and commissioned "regal" purple gowns with matching hats, complete with Komodo dragons, as well as hiring Indo-Chinese wedding planners to make sure everything goes perfectly on the big day. Unfortunately, when Meddy overhears the photographer talking about "the family" and "taking her out," it seems that the wedding planners may also be connected to the mafia and using the wedding as an opportunity to assassinate a target.

I absolutely loved Sutanto's Dial A for Aunties, which managed to combine Weekend at Bernie's with Crazy Rich Asians and still manage to hit all the dysfunctional family tropes that I love (awkward interactions, overbearing-but-well-meaning relatives, etc). This book, however, was completely unnecessary and didn't hit any of the notes on the Asian diaspora that Sutanto wanted to focus on, according to her foreword. I was unimpressed, and wish I'd just reread Dial A instead.

Silver

Silver: Return to Treasure Island by Andrew Motion, 403 pages

Forty years after Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver returned to England from Treasure Island, their children, Jim and Natty, are aboard the Nightingale, headed back to pick up the remaining silver ingots that are still buried and hopefully untouched on the tropical island. But when they get there, they don't find the deserted island they expected. No, it turns out the three pirates who were marooned on the island 40 years earlier are still alive and thriving, along with the crew and slaves from a slave ship that wrecked there some years earlier. Upon discovering this, Jim, Natty, and the crew of the Nightingale unanimously agree that rescuing those slaves is their new mission on this voyage, relegating the silver to almost an afterthought.

This book is problematic for a whole host of reasons, starting with the fact that in 1800, when this book is set, it's highly unlikely that sailors, a pirate's daughter, and a well-educated young man would all unanimously find slavery revolting. That's not to say that it isn't (duh, of course slavery is revolting), but this book takes place a full 60 years before the Civil War and more than 30 years before slavery was outlawed in the United Kingdom, so it's completely unbelievable that a whole ship of sailors would feel this immediate and all-consuming revulsion. Yet, this is where Motion sets his plot, turning what could be a light and fun pirate adventure into an anachronistic morality tale.

There were other plot and characterization problems, including a completely pointless chapter where Jim is rescued from drowning by a sea lion (I wish I was making this up), but really when it comes down to it, the main problem is that it was wholly unnecessary — Treasure Island was a wonderful book, full of all the piratical adventures one could hope for. Silver only served to tarnish the classic.