Well, that was Unexpected

Sutanto won the 2021 Comedy Women In Print Prize and she exercises her comedic talents again in this cross-continent romance. Sharlot is Indonesian but her mother has never taken her to visit the country, whereas George lives in Indonesia with his stratospherically wealthy and extremely famous family. Both have transgressed sexually in the eyes of their families, who resolve to remediate this by catfishing on a dating site on behalf of their children, in order to find them ideal partners in the Indonesian tradition.

The problems begin when each set of parents creates an idealised persona in tune with traditional family values, bearing little resemblance to the real thing. Continents apart, they would never have met but for Sharlot’s mother’s determination to take her daughter to her homeland and away from the sexual temptations which she perceives are rife in America.

Sutanto plays a hectic game, marshalling her small army of characters to comment and entertain and skilfully weaving dialogue particularly well in difficult situations. When Sharlot and George meet for their first family-organised coffee date, their exchanges are a study in awkwardness. However, she cleverly inserts a nuance of attraction between the two, energetically resisted by both because each feels the fraudulent nature of the enterprise. They are not the people their parents have painted them to be online and neither can they admit that their interaction was done under false pretences. Readers are whisked through a series of exotic locations, with every move wholly in the public eye and peopled with journalists and camera crew, creating misery and frustration for the protagonists.

The greatest success of the book is the interplay between the two characters in this hothouse situation as the attraction between them begins to develop. It is a dance-advancing and retreating and always aware of the deception which lies at the heart of their meeting, which prevents them from being honest about their feelings. Their respective families are an amalgam of Greek tragedy and farce, hilariously entertaining but always a threat to the secrecy which both George and Sharlot are trying to preserve.

Finally, they decide to share their experience online, with the truth of their interaction and their families’ reasons for instigating it in the open for everyone to share. Through this familiar medium Sutanto is able to give voice to young people’s relationship problems and the societal expectations of young women in particular. It makes a powerful and pertinent ending to the book-and the much longed-for happy ending.