Families love to say “we did it all for you,” but what if that love demands you erase yourself? In Next Time Will Be Our Turn, Jesse Q. Sutanto stares down that bargain and gives you a love story that refuses to be small—even when culture, class, and the law push it into the shadows.
It’s tender, funny, and, yes, a tear-jerker about three generations of Chinese Indonesian women learning that secrecy keeps you safe—until it doesn’t.
Love is not disobedience—it’s due diligence: Magnolia and Izzy learn that claiming joy (queer, cross-cultural, intergenerational) is the only honest way to repay the past and finance the future.
Sutanto grounds the novel in concrete time, place, and voice: first-edition imprint details (Berkley, 2025; ISBN 9780593816875) establish publication context, while the opening scene drops us into a Michelin-starred Jakarta New Year gathering from the misfit Izzy’s point of view.
Kirkus calls it “a queer Chinese Indonesian tear-jerker,” noting a near-future Jakarta backdrop and a grandmother’s secret first love as the engine of the plot.
Those stakes resonate against real-world data: Indonesia offers no national recognition of same-sex couples and patchwork protections; Aceh continues public caning for morality offenses.
Anyway, Next Time Will Be Our Turn is best for readers who crave intergenerational family drama with queer romance, diaspora texture, and a heady mix of humor and heartbreak. Not for readers seeking plot-twist thrillers or tidy happily-ever-afters (Sutanto’s ending is cathartic, not “neat”).
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Next Time Will Be Our Turn (Berkley, first edition, 2025) follows Izzy Chen—a closeted teen in Jakarta—and her grandmother, Magnolia, whose 1990s Los Angeles love story with Ellery O’Shea re-emerges to rewire the family’s future.
Sutanto’s publication page confirms the imprint and identifiers—Library of Congress records and trade paperback/ebook ISBNs—while the about-author note locates Sutanto between Indonesia, Singapore, California, and Oxford, credentials that echo in the novel’s LA/Jakarta shuttling.
That cross-Pacific fluency matters: it lets Next Time Will Be Our Turn balance Jakarta’s public-image politics with the freewheeling possibility of 1998 Pasadena and UC Berkeley, making setting a moral variable rather than just a backdrop.
2. Background
The novel opens on a maximalist Chinese New Year in a Michelin-starred restaurant—the Chen clan’s pageant of status and rivalry—where Izzy self-describes as “the misfit…the black sheep,” instantly framing a core tension: belonging versus being.
Magnolia’s thread rewinds to late-1990s LA (Pasadena City College bookstore, long walks, a gradual, aching friendship-to-love) and then leaps to 2011 for a life-pivot that collides with tragedy—structuring the book as a confession that arrives just in time to change Izzy.
Historically, the stakes are sharper than a private secret: Indonesia still withholds relationship recognition, and regions like Aceh prosecute morality offenses with caning; those constraints shape Magnolia’s silence and Izzy’s fear without ever turning the novel into a polemic.
3. Next Time Will Be Our Turn Summary
Jesse Q. Sutanto’s novel is built on a braided structure that alternates between a present-day teenager in Jakarta and the secret, decades-long love story of her grandmother. The frame lets a hidden past illuminate a fearful present until both timelines meet in a cathartic, bittersweet finale.
The table of contents itself telegraphs that design: “Izzy” opens, then the novel settles into long runs of “Magnolia” chapters, with Izzy’s brief interludes slipping in like breathers before Magnolia’s narrative crests again.
We start at the annual Chinese New Year blowout of Jakarta’s wealthy Chen clan, a party so maximalist that the family rents out an entire Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant just for themselves.
While the adults and cousins compete to make the most spectacular entrances—as they always do—sixteen-year-old Izzy Chen performs her usual act of strategic invisibility. She slips to “the darkest section of the restaurant,” names herself the family’s “misfit…black sheep,” and reads while the high-gloss peacocking swirls.
That self-portrait does two jobs at once: it tells you Izzy’s social location in the family, and it establishes the novel’s live tension—belonging vs. being.
Shortly after, we learn why Izzy’s voice is the book’s barometer of risk and relief: she is queer and closeted in a world where image discipline is survival. She is, however, not alone. Her grandmother, Magnolia—“Nainai,” as Izzy calls her—decides to tell her the story no one in the family knows: that decades earlier, Magnolia fell fiercely in love with another woman and never stopped loving her.
The confession begins with a cinematic meet-cute in late-1990s Los Angeles. Magnolia, then a bookish Indonesian teen, stands outside the Pasadena City College Bookstore and looks up to see Ellery O’Shea, a “blond goddess” in a red PCC vest whose shoulders are so striking Magnolia can’t help describing them later with humorous, thirsty specificity.
The punchline to this dazed appraisal is simple and seismic: “And that was how I met Ellery O’Shea. The love of my life.”
In Magnolia’s teen chapters, Sutanto sketches a tender, slightly lopsided friendship. Ellery is older, tall, and already moving through worlds Magnolia yearns for—American classrooms, queer social milieus, grown-up choices.
Magnolia is magnetic but timid, brilliant but managed by family obligations, and crushed by how much she wants more than what “normal” expects for a girl like her.
They cook together, watch Friends, and trade jokes that do the intimacy work before either can name it. Magnolia’s questions about Ellery’s girlfriend “Trish” sting because they reveal the wound beneath: even asking the question confirms how far outside the circle she feels, and how intensely she wants to be inside it with Ellery.
Things tilt. The friendship heats toward something truer, but teenage fear warps the timing. When Ellery admits she’s leaving—grad school, a different future—Magnolia detonates in hurt pride and self-protection. She aims her sharpest words where they’ll cut: “I’m glad you’re not staying…Don’t ever call me again.”
Then she walks away. She will imagine other versions of that scene for years—versions where Ellery chases her, versions where Magnolia tells the truth—but in the version that actually happens, their friendship ends and years fall between them.
The novel now executes its central formal trick: Magnolia’s unsent letters. After LA, through college and marriage and motherhood, Magnolia writes compulsively to “Ellery” in a stack of private pages she never mails. At first they’re love-letters in absentia; soon they mutate into a diary—an alternate timeline where Magnolia gets to be honest.
Decades later, Izzy will handle these pages and say what we’re already thinking: “There certainly seems to be enough here to make an entire book out of.” The letters make Magnolia’s fear legible, but they also keep love alive long enough for the plot’s second chance to be possible.
Back in the present, Izzy keeps walking and listening. Every time Magnolia shares a shard of her youth, Izzy revises who her grandmother is. She stops seeing just the impeccably dressed matriarch and starts seeing “that scared, lonely young girl,” the one who learned to swallow her wants until silence looked like safety.
These interludes also prime Izzy to imagine a different outcome for herself than Magnolia had—because the whole point of passing down a secret is to pass down the chance to choose differently.
Sutanto then springs the engine that will bring the two timelines into alignment: Iris, Magnolia’s formidable older sister (and Izzy’s great-aunt), finds the stash of letters and sends them—without permission—to Ellery.
Iris, who can be both ruthless and hilariously right, cuts through Magnolia’s paralysis and catalyzes the reunion. When Magnolia and Ellery finally reconnect after “over ten years in the making,” the delight is almost unbearable; they’re giddy, scolding Iris for overstepping even as they admit that “we’ve wasted enough time.”
That’s the paradox: it took exactly this transgression—this breach of Magnolia’s privacy—to free her.
From here, the reunion is a rush. Magnolia and Ellery fold right back into each other’s rhythms and into a love that never really cooled. Magnolia will say later that this time together “shines so brightly” in memory, eclipsing the rest.
She also names, with bracing clarity, what she’s doing: “How does one cheat without cheating?” First it’s shared errands and jokes, then unstoppable gravity. Magnolia resolves to leave her husband, Parker; love isn’t just a feeling now, it’s a life she means to live.
Sutanto lets the intimacy be radiant on the page. Magnolia and Ellery claim each other in shameless, giddy language—“My Ellery,” “My Tulip”—underlining how naming can be an ethical act when you’ve spent a lifetime being unnamed.
The lovemaking scene is explicit not to titillate but to argue that sex, with the right person, is a kind of truth-telling: “when it’s with your soulmate…sex isn’t just sex. It becomes the essence of truth.” The scene’s heat is matched by its mission; it’s there to say: look at what’s possible when fear loosens its grip.
Next Time Will Be Our Turn’s cruelest beat arrives when happiness crests. Magnolia and Ellery are practically floating, ready to celebrate with Iris and map out the practicalities of divorce and a shared future. Then the phone rings.
A man from Huntington Hospital is calling. Iris has been in an accident. The pages that follow are a study in denial giving way to dread as Ellery drives Magnolia to the ER, soothing her with “I’m sure it’s all going to be okay,” even as both of them start to know it won’t be.
Magnolia later sums up the whiplash of that day in one sentence: “It was both the happiest and the worst day of my life.”
That accident—and its aftermath—rearranges Magnolia’s moral math. Instead of leaving immediately, she becomes the glue for a family suddenly broken and bereaved. Even in summary, you can feel the shape of the trap: every time Magnolia moves toward the life she wants, duty yanks her back.
It isn’t that she stops loving Ellery; it’s that the price of leaving multiplies overnight, and Magnolia—timid, responsible, habituated to putting herself last—pays the price the way she always has: with her own heart.
In Izzy’s interlude that follows the hospital call, you can hear her bracing for the worst, and then revising her picture of her grandfather, her parents—everyone—once she realizes that love can be thwarted without anyone turning into a cartoon villain.
Sutanto refuses to turn the novel into pure tragedy, though. Ellery and Magnolia remain in each other’s orbit over the years; sometimes letters or glances keep the ember alive, sometimes a chance reconnection reignites it.
Their bond, always imperfectly timed, is the book’s stubborn constant. If Magnolia’s teens and twenties were shaped by fear and habit, her later years are marked by an earned candor. She tells Izzy all of it—how she compromised, where she was brave, where she wasn’t—so that Izzy can borrow that courage at a younger age and spend it where it will matter.
The Izzy line, meanwhile, builds toward its own coming-out and first love. We watch her learn to test what “safe” means with her grandmother’s hand in hers. The specifics are quiet and sweet: a girl named Kate who sees Izzy more clearly than the family’s pecking-order drama ever has; a slow-burn shift from secrecy to assertion.
What matters is that Izzy stops narrating herself as lint and starts narrating herself as a person who can pick a door and walk through it. The book saves the cleanest proof for the epilogue, in California, long after Magnolia has died. Izzy scatters ashes at a place tied to Magnolia’s education and to Ellery’s memory, and—feeling “free” in a way she never has—lets herself be held by Kate.
It isn’t the genre’s big wedding; it’s something sturdier: a promise to fight for the life she wants.
The very ending is both ghostly and ecstatic. On the night Magnolia dies in Jakarta, Izzy dreams a “vision” vivid enough to feel like a visitation. She sees her grandmother as a young woman walking across a bridge made of magnolia flowers to meet a tall, blond figure who turns and catches her.
Magnolia says, “You waited for me,” and Ellery answers, “Always, Tulip.” Arms around each other, they fade. The image resolves the novel’s long ache in one line—love outlives bad timing—and reframes the title as a promise kept. Izzy doesn’t mourn with despair; she smiles through tears because she understands what the reunion means and what it asks of her: not to waste the freedom Magnolia and her own mother carved out, often painfully, over decades.
If you zoom out, you can see the book’s architecture as a chain of choices. In youth, Magnolia’s need to be “normal” wins; fear of scandal and of being “troublesome” narrows her path.
By midlife, when the letters Iris mailed bring Ellery back into her day-to-day, love and truth flare—and then fate intervenes in the form of the hospital phone call, rerouting Magnolia back into duty. In late life, she decides to weaponize memory: by telling Izzy everything, she lets her granddaughter start where Magnolia ended, not where she began.
That’s how the novel turns a private love story into an intergenerational instruction manual.
The book also gives you charming micro-textures that make the big emotions credible.
Flash-bulb moments keep surfacing: Ellery’s car permanently kitted out with a child seat because she babysits Magnolia’s niece Hazel; small-town errands that feel like dates; seven-layer bean dip eaten with spoons because the chips keep breaking.
These fond specifics tell you how a life together might have looked if it had been allowed to happen earlier. They also ironize the tragedy: the ordinary is a miracle here.
Sutanto’s dialogue keeps the tone buoyant even when the subject is bruised. Magnolia teases Izzy, swears, and tells unflinching truths in the same breath; Izzy scolds her—“Nainai!”—and then hangs on every word.
The banter disarms the reader so that when the book finally goes for the heart, you’re unarmored. That balance is visible in a quick exchange where Magnolia needles Izzy about being “exceptionally thick,” then softens into a quiet walk “arm in arm” before the story resumes. Humor is not detour; it’s permission to keep going.
Two lines bracket the arc. The first is Magnolia’s early, unambiguous declaration: “The love of my life.” It’s as if the novel wants to resolve any doubt about what kind of story this is from the start.
The second is Ellery’s final promise—“Always, Tulip”—which arrives after death has stopped being a barrier. Together, they insist that love is not a phase you outgrow or a scandal you outlast; it’s a practice that survives timing, distance, and, in story terms, even the author’s choice to end the book.
The Ending, explained
The last movement is simple, luminous, and deliberately not “tidy.” Magnolia dies in Jakarta, and Izzy travels to the coast (in California) with Kate to scatter ashes at a site that mattered to Magnolia’s youth and studies.
Doing this there allows Izzy to physically connect the two worlds Magnolia straddled: Indonesia and the California that awakened her. When Izzy pours the ashes, she feels something like a release—“I have never felt so free in my life”—because the ritual completes Magnolia’s long arc from secrecy to testimony; Izzy now carries the story without the shame that cramped Magnolia’s early choices.
The dream/vision that follows—Magnolia walking a bridge of magnolia blossoms toward Ellery, who catches her—is not just a grace note. It retrofits the title as an answer.
Next Time Will Be Our Turn works in three registers: (1) the lovers’ pledge to find each other again; (2) a generational vow that Izzy’s generation won’t have to choose between safety and love; and (3) a broader cultural hope that the “next time” of law and custom will be kinder to queer lives.
The spectral reunion is the book’s way of granting Magnolia the unbroken future she never got in life while handing Izzy the tools to claim hers in the here and now.
As Izzy says, she doesn’t even know yet if Kate is “the love of my life”—only that when love comes, she’ll “fight like hell to be with them.” That shift—from hiding to fighting—is the point.
Why this summary matters
- Set-up: Izzy, a closeted teen in a status-obsessed Jakarta family, listens as her grandmother reveals a lifelong queer love that shaped and shadowed the family’s past.
- Rising Action: Magnolia’s 1990s LA friendship with Ellery blooms, breaks under fear and timing, and survives as unsent letters.
- Second Chance: Iris mails the letters; Magnolia and Ellery reunite, decide to build a life, and are rocked by Iris’s sudden accident.
- Aftermath: Duty pulls Magnolia back; love remains. She tells Izzy everything so the next generation won’t repeat the same silences.
- Finale: Magnolia’s death; Izzy scatters ashes and dreams of Magnolia and Ellery’s reunion—“Always, Tulip”—and promises to fight for her own life and loves.
A few emblematic lines that frame the whole tale
- Izzy’s first-page thesis about her family—“We don’t know how to keep secrets…But one thing we do know is how to make an entrance”—telegraphs both the public theater and the private cost the book will explore.
- Magnolia’s naming—“The love of my life”—turns a crush into a lifelong axis.
- Iris’s meddling made manifest—those “unbelievably sappy letters”—hands the plot its turning key.
- The ecstatic claim—“My Ellery…My Tulip”—argues for love as mutual possession after years of dispossession.
- And the benediction—“Always, Tulip.”—ties a bow the living couldn’t.
That’s the novel in full. If you only read this summary, you now know the plot from entrance to epilogue, the major reversals, why the hospital call matters, and exactly how the ending resolves the book’s oldest promise.
4. Next Time Will Be Our Turn Analysis
Sutanto structures Next Time Will Be Our Turn as alternating confession and counter-narrative—Magnolia’s “then” set against Izzy’s “now”—so each revelation about the past becomes a tool Izzy can actually use.
The effect is sly: the romantic plot doubles as a pedagogy of courage, showing a teen how to read the world (and her family) with more precision than their curated image allows.
And because Sutanto is funny, she salts the most vulnerable scenes with banter—Magnolia’s thirst-y description of Ellery’s shoulders, Izzy’s delightfully exasperated “Nainai!”—so the book never wallows.
4.1 Next Time Will Be Our Turn Characters
Magnolia (Nainai): A study in evolution—from timid to “badass”—she narrates first love (“the love of my life”) with disarming frankness and later claims queer joy on her own terms.
Ellery O’Shea: A “blond goddess” bookseller turned journalist whose steadiness (“Always, Tulip.”) makes her both first love and ethical north star.
Izzy: A Jakarta teen who starts as the family’s unnoticed corner-dweller and ends as someone who can name her fear, spot her future, and choose it.
4.2 Next Time Will Be Our Turn Themes and Symbolism
Secrets vs. safety: Magnolia’s “letters never sent” literalize the cost of silence; their heft feels like a second, secret novel inside the novel.
Belonging vs. becoming: Izzy’s “misfit” stance at a starched family pageant mirrors Magnolia’s LA awakening; doorways and gates recur (Ellery opening the side gate; Magnolia stepping toward the surf) as visual cues for chosen thresholds.
Time’s unfair bargains: Sutanto undercuts neat closure—Ellery dies years before Magnolia is free—which reframes the title as both lament and instruction to the next generation.
5. Evaluation
Strengths: The dual-timeline voice is electric; set pieces snap (Chinese New Year’s spectacle; PCC meet-cute; a late call from Huntington Hospital that flips bliss into catastrophe); the banter disarms and then devastates.
Weaknesses: A few middle-section beats circle the same wound (letters, missed chances); some readers may find the denouement’s spectral note too romantic-mythic for an otherwise realist frame.
Impact: I finished smiling through tears, not because the book promises safety, but because it models practice: say the thing, even if your voice shakes; pick the door, even if it squeaks.
Comparison with similar works: Fans of Dial A for Aunties will recognize Sutanto’s warmth and comedic timing, but this leans closer to intergenerational romances like Fredrik Backman’s And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer in tenderness, with a diaspora pulse you’d find in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. (For author context, see Sutanto’s bio and accolades.)
6. Personal insight
If you teach civics, literature, or global studies, pair this novel with a short briefing on Indonesia’s LGBTQ+ legal landscape—no national relationship recognition, inconsistent protections, and regional morality codes—to help students see how law calibrates private risk.
Then, use Magnolia’s “unsent letters” as a writing exercise: ask students to compose a letter they won’t send, and a second version they will, naming the concrete risk in each setting; you’ll get powerful discussions about audience, safety, and voice that mirror Izzy’s arc from concealment to self-advocacy.
For current context, see Equaldex’s rights tracker and recent AP coverage of caning in Aceh; contrast those with the book’s LA chapters to examine how place grants or withholds options. (External refs: Equaldex; AP News).
Finally, if you’re curating reading lists for diaspora-studies units, bring in scholarship on queer literature in the Sinosphere to situate the novel in a broader, transnational conversation.
7. Next Time Will Be Our Turn Quotes
“There are a lot of things we don’t seem to know how to do…But one thing we do know is how to make an entrance.” (Izzy, opening page at the New Year banquet).
“And that was how I met Ellery O’Shea. The love of my life.” (Magnolia’s origin story at PCC Bookstore).
“You waited for me. … Always, Tulip.” (A late, luminous reunion vision that reframes grief).
“I like to think that she meant it when she said she’d wait for me.” (The cost of timing and the ethics of fidelity).
“Use it to buy your freedom.” (Nainai to Izzy, turning inheritance into strategy).
8. Conclusion
Sutanto has written an emotionally intelligent, culturally specific love story that reads like oral history—gossipy, generous, and strategically brave.
It’s significant not just because it centers queer Chinese Indonesian lives, but because it teaches a transferable lesson: you can’t inherit freedom; you have to practice it.
Recommendation: Essential for fans of diaspora fiction, queer romance, mother-daughter/grandmother-granddaughter narratives, and classroom discussions about law and intimacy—readers who want warmth with bite.
