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Troppo
Black magic, big waves and mad Aussie expats.
In Indonesia, Penny is drifting, partying, hanging out – a thousand miles away from claustrophobic Perth and her career-minded boyfriend. But things take a dangerous turn when she goes to work at Shane’s Sumatran Oasis.
Caught up in the hostility directed at Shane, and flirting and surfing with the hell-man Matt, Penny soon finds herself swept into a world where two very different cultures must collide.
In Indonesia, Penny is drifting, partying, hanging out – a thousand miles away from claustrophobic Perth and her career-minded boyfriend. But things take a dangerous turn when she goes to work at Shane’s Sumatran Oasis.
Caught up in the hostility directed at Shane, and flirting and surfing with the hell-man Matt, Penny soon finds herself swept into a world where two very different cultures must collide.
264 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2016
6 people are currently reading
111 people want to read
About the author
Madelaine Dickie
4 books26 followersMadelaine surfs, writes and works on the muscly, grey, and shark-spooked Southern Ocean, on the bottom coast of Western Australia. She’s won the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award and has been shortlisted in the Western Australian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Dobbie Literary Award and the Barbara Jefferis Award. Keen to get in touch? Drop her a message on Instagram @madelainetroppo
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
July 27, 2016
Great read, fast paced, excellent representation of expat Indo experiences. I loved the detail that emerged me in Indonesian smells, tastes, sounds and peculiarities. Can't wait for a sequel. There has to be one!
March 5, 2020
‘The first story I hear about my new boss is in a brothel in Bandar Lampung.’
November 2004. Penny, in her early twenties, is taking some time out — from life in Perth, away from her boyfriend Josh, an escape from responsibility. She’s in Sumatra where she’s about to start work for Shane at his coastal resort. Penny spent a year in Bali as a teenager, she’s a surfer, keen to surf when she’s not working.
But the remote village of Batu Batur is not the Bali of Penny’s teenage years. This is the period just after the Bali and Denpasar bombings, just before the Boxing Day Tsunami. Islam is observed more strictly here, foreigners are viewed with suspicion. Plenty of people warn Penny about working with Shane, but she’s keen to earn the huge bonus he has promised her if she works for six months.
Penny doesn’t see herself as privileged, but relative to the Indonesians she meets she is. She is also caught between cultures: wanting to respect Indonesian customs but feeling restricted by the constraints placed on women. Penny surfs with the expat Matt, spends time in an even more remote village with Cahyati (the niece of the woman who manages the bungalows where she stays while waiting to start her job with Shane). And there’s a continual undercurrent in relation to Shane: he’s not liked or trusted.
‘It’s funny, you always think of the other as being in relation to yourself. You never imagine that you could be that other.’
What will Penny do? Does she know what she is searching for? Can she find it in Indonesia? There are several themes here: first world privilege competes with guilt, contrasting lifestyles and opportunities. The resentment that tourists can generate, while bringing much needed income.
Penny can see some of the problems for locals in Indonesia and the impact on village life.
While I had some limited sympathy for Penny, my greater interest in this novel was the contrast between cultures and expectations. I was more worried about Cahyati than I was about Penny. And yet, Penny’s journey provided an entry into Indonesian life that would not have been possible for a different character. This was Ms Dickie’s debut novel, and it is well worth reading.
‘Australians think they own Bali.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
November 2004. Penny, in her early twenties, is taking some time out — from life in Perth, away from her boyfriend Josh, an escape from responsibility. She’s in Sumatra where she’s about to start work for Shane at his coastal resort. Penny spent a year in Bali as a teenager, she’s a surfer, keen to surf when she’s not working.
But the remote village of Batu Batur is not the Bali of Penny’s teenage years. This is the period just after the Bali and Denpasar bombings, just before the Boxing Day Tsunami. Islam is observed more strictly here, foreigners are viewed with suspicion. Plenty of people warn Penny about working with Shane, but she’s keen to earn the huge bonus he has promised her if she works for six months.
Penny doesn’t see herself as privileged, but relative to the Indonesians she meets she is. She is also caught between cultures: wanting to respect Indonesian customs but feeling restricted by the constraints placed on women. Penny surfs with the expat Matt, spends time in an even more remote village with Cahyati (the niece of the woman who manages the bungalows where she stays while waiting to start her job with Shane). And there’s a continual undercurrent in relation to Shane: he’s not liked or trusted.
‘It’s funny, you always think of the other as being in relation to yourself. You never imagine that you could be that other.’
What will Penny do? Does she know what she is searching for? Can she find it in Indonesia? There are several themes here: first world privilege competes with guilt, contrasting lifestyles and opportunities. The resentment that tourists can generate, while bringing much needed income.
Penny can see some of the problems for locals in Indonesia and the impact on village life.
While I had some limited sympathy for Penny, my greater interest in this novel was the contrast between cultures and expectations. I was more worried about Cahyati than I was about Penny. And yet, Penny’s journey provided an entry into Indonesian life that would not have been possible for a different character. This was Ms Dickie’s debut novel, and it is well worth reading.
‘Australians think they own Bali.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
December 4, 2024
Troppo is going to be on the 2020 reading list for the Indonesian book group I belong to, and it's a good choice for discussion because it's the story of a young Australian woman who goes to work in Sumatra, offering the perspective of an Australian who is fluent in Indonesian and knows the country quite well. Like Simone Lazaroo (who won the award in 1993), Dickie writes as an outsider with some inside experience of Indonesia. Most of the people in our group have a great deal of inside experience of Indonesia, so I'm looking forward to hearing what they think of the novel.
Penny, the central character and narrator of the story, is her own worst enemy. The book begins with an alarming incident where she hears first-hand from a young woman who had worked for her future boss, Shane, but she decides to ignore those warning signs. Penny is a keen surfer, telling herself that she's in Sumatra to manage a coastal resort for a few months so that she can surf in her time off, but really, she's running away. She's evading the problems she is having in her Australian relationship with a man called Josh. Some years older than her, he is everything she is not: prudent, sensible, and comfortable with routines. He's career-minded, and settled-down contentedly in Perth. But Penny, perhaps because of her disrupted youth which included time out with her father on Bali for a year, likes to party, to drift, and to have an adventurous lifestyle. Reckless and naïve, Penny is warned off working for Shane by both expats and the locals with whom she is staying, but she ignores the weight of all this hostility and takes up her job at the resort. (His offer of a huge bonus if she lasts for six months helps her to make up her mind!)
Troppo shows this young woman experiencing a conflict of values. The novel is set in November 2004, just after the Bali and Denpasar bombings, and just before the Boxing Day tsunami. In contrast to her free-and-easy year on Bali, she finds the oppressive influence of strict Islamism has spread to the remote village of Batu Batur, and it makes her feel uneasy. She wants to respect Indonesian customs and culture, and she disapproves of young women flouting the cultural mores with scanty clothing, but she's used to Western freedoms, and feels resentful of restrictions placed on women because of their gender.
Penny is not a blithe tourist with a romanticised perspective: she observes the back-breaking labour in the rice paddies and feels uncomfortable about her own privileged position. At the same time, while she knows that she and Westerners like her are regarded as rich by virtue of their capacity to travel, to holiday, and to spend freely in the Indonesian economy, she has finite resources when it comes to returning to Australia. At home she is certainly not rich, and her erratic work history in the unqualified hospitality sector makes her financial future rather precarious. But her feelings of guilt lead to impulsive generosity — which of course reinforces local opinion that she has money to burn...
Considering herself well-acquainted with the domestic politics of commercial development in Indonesia, Penny thinks that the hostility to Shane is because of his impact on village life. But she is inevitably compromised. Her job involves working in a resort that supplants the local culture with its lavish facilities. Still, she can see that not only have the local fisherman had their livelihood disrupted by restrictions imposed by Shane, but also that resort development doesn't benefit the locals if they're not employed there.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/12/06/t...
Penny, the central character and narrator of the story, is her own worst enemy. The book begins with an alarming incident where she hears first-hand from a young woman who had worked for her future boss, Shane, but she decides to ignore those warning signs. Penny is a keen surfer, telling herself that she's in Sumatra to manage a coastal resort for a few months so that she can surf in her time off, but really, she's running away. She's evading the problems she is having in her Australian relationship with a man called Josh. Some years older than her, he is everything she is not: prudent, sensible, and comfortable with routines. He's career-minded, and settled-down contentedly in Perth. But Penny, perhaps because of her disrupted youth which included time out with her father on Bali for a year, likes to party, to drift, and to have an adventurous lifestyle. Reckless and naïve, Penny is warned off working for Shane by both expats and the locals with whom she is staying, but she ignores the weight of all this hostility and takes up her job at the resort. (His offer of a huge bonus if she lasts for six months helps her to make up her mind!)
Troppo shows this young woman experiencing a conflict of values. The novel is set in November 2004, just after the Bali and Denpasar bombings, and just before the Boxing Day tsunami. In contrast to her free-and-easy year on Bali, she finds the oppressive influence of strict Islamism has spread to the remote village of Batu Batur, and it makes her feel uneasy. She wants to respect Indonesian customs and culture, and she disapproves of young women flouting the cultural mores with scanty clothing, but she's used to Western freedoms, and feels resentful of restrictions placed on women because of their gender.
Penny is not a blithe tourist with a romanticised perspective: she observes the back-breaking labour in the rice paddies and feels uncomfortable about her own privileged position. At the same time, while she knows that she and Westerners like her are regarded as rich by virtue of their capacity to travel, to holiday, and to spend freely in the Indonesian economy, she has finite resources when it comes to returning to Australia. At home she is certainly not rich, and her erratic work history in the unqualified hospitality sector makes her financial future rather precarious. But her feelings of guilt lead to impulsive generosity — which of course reinforces local opinion that she has money to burn...
Considering herself well-acquainted with the domestic politics of commercial development in Indonesia, Penny thinks that the hostility to Shane is because of his impact on village life. But she is inevitably compromised. Her job involves working in a resort that supplants the local culture with its lavish facilities. Still, she can see that not only have the local fisherman had their livelihood disrupted by restrictions imposed by Shane, but also that resort development doesn't benefit the locals if they're not employed there.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/12/06/t...
February 15, 2018
When you don’t really like any of the characters in a book it’s hard to connect to the events. I found this a bit of a whirlwind tour of tourism, religion, Black magic and sex. There were no real positive moments or enlightening sparks of humanness. I’m left feeling bleak and dark about Indonesia when I know there’s a lot of light.
February 24, 2021
A jolly good read. A quick fast-paced story of a young woman escaping Perth and a boring way of life with an older boyfriend straight into a small town in Sumatra brimming with political, religious and expat tension. The author describes the atmosphere extremely well. I felt immersed in the story and couldn’t put the book down.
May 27, 2020
This is an easy read but was very enjoyable for me personally. The young woman in the story is adventurous, courageous and a bit foolhardy but that is part of the psyche of a young person travelling alone and unshackled from family and/or home town restrictions.
Penny is “having a break” from her relationship with an older man in Perth and her dead-end jobs to take a job in a hotel/resort in a remote area of Sumatra. She has spent time in Indonesia as a teenager, speaks the language and loves to surf so the opportunity sounds ideal. However living in Sumatra is not the idyllic lifestyle imagined by Australians and other Europeans who have bought land and established resorts after being seduced by the “dream” of tropical paradises.
Penny finds the Sumatran villagers much more aggressive and disturbing than the people she associated with in Bali and other parts of Indonesia in her youth. There is more religious and racial tension plus the Europeans living in the region are not accepted and several feel that they need to leave. Her new employer Shane, is not liked by anyone – white or brown – and his ideas of paying bribes (with money and alcohol) to maintain his position and privatise his resort land is intolerable and offensive in an impoverished plus Muslim society.
Dickie is clearly well travelled and an experienced surfer. Her writing is effective and unpretentious so that the impressions of the heat, rain, smells, mosquitoes etc, are felt by the reader without overdoing the descriptions. Penny has to decide whether to stay in the job with Shane and the lure of pay and a bonus after six months or leave and cut her losses. Her instincts tell her to run but she does not want to admit defeat and go back to her boyfriend in Perth. Also, any communication with Josh has been unpredictable as she lost her phone on her way over, the internet café in the village is OK for emails but real calls have to be booked at another establishment.
The tension builds right to the end: people like Matt who she thought was her friend is duplicitous; she is confronted by the local police aggressively seeking bribes while Shane is away plus the local staff conveniently have disappeared. Shane’s mental state worsens and Penny is very aware that there are several plans in the community to get rid of him. To cap it off, Josh suddenly appears in the village with her possessions as he has returned to his wife so her backup relationship is definitely over.
I look forward to reading Madelaine Dickie’s second novel Red Can Origami which was published last year.
Penny is “having a break” from her relationship with an older man in Perth and her dead-end jobs to take a job in a hotel/resort in a remote area of Sumatra. She has spent time in Indonesia as a teenager, speaks the language and loves to surf so the opportunity sounds ideal. However living in Sumatra is not the idyllic lifestyle imagined by Australians and other Europeans who have bought land and established resorts after being seduced by the “dream” of tropical paradises.
Penny finds the Sumatran villagers much more aggressive and disturbing than the people she associated with in Bali and other parts of Indonesia in her youth. There is more religious and racial tension plus the Europeans living in the region are not accepted and several feel that they need to leave. Her new employer Shane, is not liked by anyone – white or brown – and his ideas of paying bribes (with money and alcohol) to maintain his position and privatise his resort land is intolerable and offensive in an impoverished plus Muslim society.
Dickie is clearly well travelled and an experienced surfer. Her writing is effective and unpretentious so that the impressions of the heat, rain, smells, mosquitoes etc, are felt by the reader without overdoing the descriptions. Penny has to decide whether to stay in the job with Shane and the lure of pay and a bonus after six months or leave and cut her losses. Her instincts tell her to run but she does not want to admit defeat and go back to her boyfriend in Perth. Also, any communication with Josh has been unpredictable as she lost her phone on her way over, the internet café in the village is OK for emails but real calls have to be booked at another establishment.
The tension builds right to the end: people like Matt who she thought was her friend is duplicitous; she is confronted by the local police aggressively seeking bribes while Shane is away plus the local staff conveniently have disappeared. Shane’s mental state worsens and Penny is very aware that there are several plans in the community to get rid of him. To cap it off, Josh suddenly appears in the village with her possessions as he has returned to his wife so her backup relationship is definitely over.
I look forward to reading Madelaine Dickie’s second novel Red Can Origami which was published last year.
October 6, 2024
This book makes me want to go to indo and I thought it was cool
November 2, 2024
Really weird but I liked it. Read this in one day. Made me feel inspired to be an independent woman in the world. Cool to read about an australian while in australia
February 13, 2020
4.5 stars. Exquisite prose.
July 2, 2020
Troppo had a lot of different threads. These were not tied up which in my opinion is often a sign of good writing, but frustratingly the threads were also not deeply explored which made the reading experience disjointed and superficial.
The theme of the cultural intersection between Indonesians and westerners was a strength of the book - the writer seems to have a deep understanding of the issue.
The protagonist, Penny, seems to travel through life guided by her whims and without forming any attachments with the people she encounters. As a reader I found it difficult to maintain an interest in her because she seemed uninvested and untouched by the people she encountered.
The theme of the cultural intersection between Indonesians and westerners was a strength of the book - the writer seems to have a deep understanding of the issue.
The protagonist, Penny, seems to travel through life guided by her whims and without forming any attachments with the people she encounters. As a reader I found it difficult to maintain an interest in her because she seemed uninvested and untouched by the people she encountered.
January 2, 2017
I personally loved this book. Tropical flavour, mystery, thriller, romance and it all felt like an honest account all the way through. Madelaine is excellent at setting a scene through all the senses, and I felt like I was there the whole time. I would highly recommend this as an easy, fast-paced summer read.
March 23, 2019
Not a "big" book in terms of scope or ideas, but perfectly crafted. It had an incredibly strong sense of place and time, totally transported me to Indo and the mid-twenties sense of discovery of the world. Loved her main character, and got lost in the story - immersive storytelling that had me transported, in part back to my own explorations as a backpacker. Very strong writing and a good story.
September 2, 2016
I finished the book and then I dreamed of surfing. It's a great read and the short chapters had me struggling to put it down. Get on it.
October 2, 2016
Great read, story shows a great knowledge and passion for the area. Would recommend to anyone.
December 8, 2016
An exciting whirl-wind adventure across two very different cultures, told by a well developed narrator who encounters a cast of characters relatable to anyone who has ever lived abroad. A wonderful read.
January 8, 2025
A quick read with short sharp chapters.. however, it missed the mark a little for me. A good time filler - however I didn't enjoy it as much as other readers. Quite an abrupt ending indicating the likelihood of a sequel.
December 12, 2017
A wonderful book! Vibrant and enthralling, with such gorgeous lush language. I enjoyed it immensely.
July 6, 2022
3.5 ⭐️
August 26, 2024
Good descriptions of locations, easy to read
Plot made sense
Could be a real life experience
Plot made sense
Could be a real life experience
April 25, 2025
Why so short!!!
September 25, 2023
I am left with a serious book hangover after this one, Penny free spirited, lost and untethered.
Maybe tapped into a bit too much of my 22 year old self.
Maybe tapped into a bit too much of my 22 year old self.
October 2, 2016
Absolutely fantastic book that drew me in from the beginning. Loved every minute of this capturing novel and brilliantly constructed storyline- couldn't put the book down!
December 21, 2016
Great book for a young traveller. A quick, easy read that gives a bit of background and insight into what it might be like for an expat in Indo. Just not my type of book.
May 20, 2020
Surprisingly dark story about Indonesia & Australian surfing tourism. Loved it
April 16, 2017
Set in southwest coastal Sumatra, Troppo starts a couple of months after the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in September 2004 and ends just after the tsunami hit Aceh on 26 December 2004. Penny, around 22 years old, had lived in Indonesia as a teen, but is returning to have “a break” from her significantly older boyfriend Josh. She has lined up a job on a surfing resort run by expat Shane, but arrives early to have a holiday. That’s the set up. The novel then explores the personal and political relationships that develop (or pre-exist) between the locals and the expat community, and within the expat community itself, in a tense situation where corruption and bullying is rife, and fundamentalist Islam is on the rise, threatening a culture that has traditionally accommodated different values and beliefs.
For my complete review, please check: https://whisperinggums.com/2017/03/31...
For my complete review, please check: https://whisperinggums.com/2017/03/31...
Read
May 14, 2018recent..(2018). A great insight into Indo street culture, doesn't miss a trick..with a sparse sharp style.
This girls good!
This girls good!
Want to read
August 18, 2018Suggested by Brad
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews