Ahhh, the Aunties...

We have been in some heavy territory this month — murders, missing roommates, gender identity, grief, and institutional secrets. All of it necessary. All of it worthy. But today we are giving ourselves permission to breathe.

This week’s feature is simple and unapologetic: books that make you laugh, exhale, feel genuinely seen, and believe — maybe for the first time in a while — that things can work out. Not because life is easy, but because good stories remind us that joy is not naïve. It is, in fact, one of the bravest things a book can deliver.

Welcome to our joyful reading feature. Pull up a chair. Stay a while.

What We Mean When We Say Joyful

We do not mean books without weight. The best feel-good reads carry real stakes — family pressure, self-doubt, cultural expectation, heartbreak, and the specific exhaustion of trying to be everything to everyone. What makes them joyful is not the absence of those things but the way the characters move through them: with humor, with community, with warmth, and with the hard-won belief that they deserve good things.

The books we are resharing today are exactly that. They will make you smile, chuckle or laugh out loud at least once. They will also make you feel something quieter and more lasting underneath the laughter.

Reshared Video: Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

We first shared our video discussion of Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? earlier this year, and we are bringing it back today because it is exactly the kind of book this week calls for. Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s debut novel is — in the best possible way — the book that will make you feel every family dinner you have ever survived.

The Story

Yinka Oladeji is thirty-one years old, Oxford-educated, well-employed, and, by every measure that matters to her Nigerian-British family, an utter failure. She is single. Deeply, conspicuously, prayer-request-at-every-church-gathering single. Her mother’s refrain is constant. Her aunties pray over her at baby showers. Her younger sister is already married and expecting. And now her cousin Rachel is engaged, which means Yinka has a deadline: find a date for the wedding, or face the full weight of her family’s very vocal concern.

What follows is a joyful, sharp, and genuinely funny novel about what it costs to try to please everyone and what it feels like to finally stop. Yinka commences Operation Find-A-Date with a spreadsheet and her best friend. The results are chaotic, illuminating, and occasionally mortifying — but always warm.

Why We Love It

Blackburn writes about the tension between two cultures with the confidence of someone who has lived it her entire life. Yinka is neither fully Nigerian nor fully British enough for anyone around her, and that particular kind of in-betweenness — funny on the surface, genuinely aching underneath — gives the novel its texture. There is also a therapist character who appears midway through the book and quietly becomes one of the most quietly radical things in it: Yinka goes to therapy, and it helps, and nobody treats that as strange.

Reshared Video: Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto

If Yinka is the novel that understands family pressure with warmth and wit, Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto is the novel that takes that same energy, adds one accidental murder and a billionaire’s wedding, and turns the volume all the way up. Netflix bought the film rights in a competitive bidding war. Once you read it, that will make complete sense.

The Story

Meddelin Chan — Meddy — is a wedding photographer working in her family’s business alongside her mother and three aunties. When a disastrous blind date arranged by her mother ends with Meddy accidentally killing the man, she does what any reasonable person would do: calls her mother, who calls the aunties, and together they decide to hide the body in a cake cooler.

The body ends up at the wrong wedding. The wrong wedding happens to be the biggest event of the year — a billionaire’s celebration on a California island resort. The dead man turns out to be the son of a crime lord. And Meddy’s ex-boyfriend, whom she has not seen in years, is the groom’s personal photographer.

Things escalate from there.

Why We Love It

Dial A for Aunties is pure, gleeful, perfectly timed chaos. The New York Times called it a high-wire act of comic timing — and that is exactly what it is. Sutanto manages something genuinely difficult: she writes absurdist comedy that also makes you care about the characters underneath the mayhem. The relationship between Meddy and her mother figures — overbearing, deeply loving, occasionally infuriating, fiercely protective — is the heart of the book, and it is drawn with real affection.

Sutanto grew up in Jakarta and Singapore, and she writes Chinese-Indonesian culture with the insider authority of someone who is laughing with her family, not at them. The author’s note at the beginning of the book is worth reading before you start — it sets the tone beautifully and explains, with love, why the aunties speak the way they do.

This is the book to read on a long afternoon when you want to laugh until something surprises you, then laugh again.

 A Few More to Add to Your Joyful Reading List

If today’s two videos have you in the mood for more, here are a few titles we keep recommending in this vein:

The Maid by Nita Prose — a quietly delightful mystery featuring one of the most original protagonists in recent fiction. Molly the maid sees the world differently than everyone around her, and the novel’s warmth is genuine and unhurried.

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry — the gold standard of the will-they-won’t-they road trip romance. Funny, nostalgic, and genuinely moving by the end.

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren — a fake-relationship rom-com set at a luxury resort that delivers exactly what it promises: laughs, banter, and a slow burn that earns its heat.

Beach Read by Emily Henry — two writers with writer’s block, a summer bet, and completely incompatible worldviews. Warm and clever and very hard to put down.

Coming This Thursday

Thursday, we turn the page to something with a little more edge underneath the romance. We are featuring November 9 by Colleen Hoover — the novel about Fallon and Ben, two strangers who meet on the same date every year and agree to no contact in between. What begins as a love story structured around annual meetings slowly reveals itself to be something more complicated, more shadowed, and more surprising than either character — or the reader — anticipated. CoHo at her most precise. We’ll have the full feature, a book club discussion guide, and a conversation about the twist that still catches readers off guard. See you Thursday.

Today’s Honey Bee Fun Fact - Did You Know?

Bees—especially honeybees—can learn to recognize individual human faces, even though their brains are tiny and lack any dedicated face-recognition circuitry. They do this through "configural processing," learning the spatial layout of features like eyes, nose, and mouth rather than each part on its own. In studies, bees trained with a sugar-water reward tied to one face photo could later pick that same face out from unfamiliar ones. This skill isn't a special "face module"—it's likely just their general pattern-recognition ability, normally used for spotting flowers, applied to a new kind of pattern.

Watch This: Bees Recognizing Human Faces

A new bee fact every Thursday in August.

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The Mojito Reader · Book Reviews, Book Club Chats & Literary Escapes · Published Every Tuesday & Thursday