Reviews with content warning for Rape - Exciting Times

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Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

32 reviews

kajasversion's review against another edition

medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A very interesting character exploration, I really liked the story and the way the characters were written. I am a bit confused about the ending, but I would read it again.

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irammy's review against another edition

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funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Thoroughly enjoyed. Lovely prose without being verbose. I found the first part a little frustrating but became hooked in the second part and inhaled the rest of the book.

In particular I loved how the relationship escalator is (relatively nonchalantly) challenged. I also found<Ava's relationship with men and her sexuality interesting.

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l0v3lu's review against another edition

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funny hopeful lighthearted reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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lucylou's review against another edition

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

I feel like I’m being generous giving this book a two star rating. The main character Ava is insufferable; she’s self-centered, insecure, indecisive, and only self-aware enough to feel guilty about hurting people, but not enough to try to fix anything. I pushed through the book to get to the sapphic romance around the half-way mark, but it was not worth it. Ava is so self-absorbed that when talking about Edith she spends more time comparing herself to her. I did not feel like Ava even liked Edith as a person, let alone fell in love her. Ava seems to have no idea why Edith would be angry that

Ava had a sexual relationship with Julian and never told her about it, and instead acting like Edith wasn’t open-minded to polyamory. Like, no, you lied through your entire relationship with Edith. You are an ass.

The last third has some interesting parts, like when Ava gave us more insight into how she “actually” felt about Edith after their breakup, but for the most part this story left me unsatisfied and annoyed.
Edit: after writing this review, I knocked it down to 1 star. Every character was boring or insufferable except for Edith.

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juleg's review

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This is the first book I read of Naoise Dolan, and I love the way she creates characters and shares their inner world with us. As someone Ava’s Age, she did a great job encapsulating some of the inner turmoil women can face at this point in their lives, especially coming to terms with their sexuality. The book and the characters were messy at times, and I loved that.

The ending left me a little unsatisfied, but it fit the characters, so I can’t really complain.

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annoyedhumanoid's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

very similar to the only Sally Rooney book i've read, Normal People, (in fact, both audiobooks were read by the same person) but where i found NP depressing, i found Exciting Times *comforting*. i think it's in the narration: NP's is third-person, detached, and almost cold, while ET's is first-person, familiar, and didn't make everything feel completely futile? it helped that i related a lot, more than i would like, to the narrator 🥲 she's just like me fr. i loved her character's voice (in the literary sense, not the audiobook, though that was good too), i saw myself reflected in it a bit.
i want to talk about the ending. at first i was disappointed, asking myself how the author could think that's a good place to stop. but i read it back and there's more to it:

the comparison of exiting the subway station to ascending into the clouds—heavenly, or at least stepping out of the dark and into the light. and to spot & run after Edith there? and Ava's admission to herself that she loves Edith, and that Edith changed her life… i think it says more about me that i wasn't against her moving to Frankfurt with Julian. because at least she had someone who ostensibly wanted her, and what more is there, right? but that's not what i was meant to take away. it's a little bit romcom, but chase after the person you wronged in a transit hub and get them back; don't settle for the emotionally stunted man-child. (i do actually kind of like Julian though, despite his politics [Miles is right]).

i also appreciate that the book is a vessel for talking about these things: even though you lovely storygraphians did not ask to hear any of this, it's nice to be able to express it.

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abbruzzese's review against another edition

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funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.

the more i read books written by authors with a similar writing style to sally rooney, the more i realize how much i dislike sally rooney's writing. naoise dolan writes the way sally rooney thinks she does. at least that's how i think of it. dolan's writing has the wit and humour and snark needed to balance out the sociopolitical commentary and regretful introspection (much of which is so accurately reflected upon myself that it is equal parts terrifying and thrilling).

i think it's very understandable and important for a girl to have a man who she hates solely on the grounds that he does nothing to justify her feeling any other way about him. someone with whom she can say, "no, there's no genuine contempt here, however a slight animosity is the only mutual feeling either of us can play up convincingly enough to give this relationship any sort of flavour, so that's how it is." because being able to think like that—if you cared as little about me as you claim you do, you'd have gotten rid of me long ago. and because i am still here, i know this lack of consideration for me is a facade, and i can enjoy the fun that being mean brings without the usual worry that it is all based in something real.—is so good for a girl's psyche, actually. i am lucky enough to have a boy like this in my life.
it is very refreshing from other friendships, where there is no hatred, and also from other enemyships, where the hatred is real and means there's something unlikeable—and, consequently, wrong—about me.

however, there are lots of things about this book that make it a bad book fundamentally. mostly, there is a lot of casual racism that is written so plainly it is easy to miss if you don't tend to pick up on things like that (which i don't, something i know is problematic in my own being and indicative of the inherent privilege i have as a white person who can read racist things and not think too hard about them at first). there is no reason for being set in hong kong. you could pick this story up and drop it into the middle of any non-white country and achieve the exact same result. even so, despite being set in hong kong, the main characters are both white. if we divide ava's social circles into categories of friends, work colleagues, and families, only one category—friends—has any non-white people in it. and even so, half of it is still white (there are only two people in said category, julian and edith, but i rest my case).

overall i did enjoy reading this book. except i think i missed the big meanings and lessons and morals. after finishing it, i have a bit of a sour taste in my mouth caused by realizing things that didn't occur to me while reading (re: casual racism). also, i can't really grasp how things play out between ava and edith in the end. i largely dislike books with vague, unspecified endings, and sorry to say it but this book had one of them. but i can just invent a proper ending in my head and go on with my life, so that's not too troubling.

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elenakperez's review

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dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I think this was well-written and interesting read. Most of the book takes place inside the protagonist's head. If you enjoy a Sally-Rooney-esque novel you'll like Exciting Times. If you like reading about an emotionally detached, 20-something woman making poor life decisions which many could be avoided with simple communication then you'll like this book.

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maarigirl's review

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dark funny informative lighthearted reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

This book is easy to read but gets quite boring after some time because nothing really happens. The main character talks a lot about she hates herself, which is quite depressing to read. Also I hate how none of the characters feel real. They all seem awful and definitely make me think less of humanity.
I'd recommend this book to someone who wants to know more about Hong Kong and enjoys discourse about language. It also discusses class and marxism, which is somewhat interesting.

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james1star's review against another edition

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

I desperately wanted to love this book. The themes, setting, plot and writing style drew me in. But mostly it’s comparison and likeness to Sally Rooney, whom I adore, is what really made me want to read this. But alas… I kinda hated it. I don’t want to go on too long as this I already feel has taken up too much of my time enough but Yhh.

Plot: Irish postgrad Ava teaches rich kids English in Hong Kong, has relationship with a rich banker who buys her stuff and she questions it, he leaves for a bit she she becomes infatuated with a woman, they have a relationship and that’s all you’re getting… read one the spoiler reviews for more.

What I liked: there were definitely some memorable quotes and snippets and impactful parts. The writing is ‘good’ and for the most part understandable, with somewhat lyrical or at least complex (I’m not that good at explaining) descriptions of things. It did have some witty and interesting takes in parts that made me LOL. The book also deals with quite a lot of topics e.g. class, relationships, power dynamics, sexuality, minor alludes to racism (I’ll develop in a sec) among others which is good but I personally don’t feel they were dealt with the best but Yhh… I dunno.

What I didn’t like: as it’s in my head now I’ll talk about this first but I don’t think the bi/pan(/ I don’t know what to ‘label’ Ava because she doesn’t and of course we don’t need to but Yhh someone who has an intimate relationship with people of multiple genders) rep is not the best because Ava is ‘cheating’ on her partners and this is a big stereotype of the bi community sooo. Also racism can be alluded to like the way Edith’s mum treats the probably southeast Asian helper where in Hong Kong this inter-Asian racism is a big problem and Dolan mentions it very slightly but doesn’t extrapolate. Furthermore, many of the Asian characters fit stereotypes like the children Ava teachers being typical-Asian-Tiger-kids-who-don’t-really-want-to-learn-English-but-are-made-to and are described as ‘copycats’ - Edith also fits this persona and her mum being a typical Asian tiger mum.

Next paragraph for the characters. I honestly didn’t like any of them and not in an ‘intriguing villain’ kinda way but more so ‘I could not care less if you do or don’t get what you want’ kinda way. They weren’t really developed and shown to be quite shallow with certain characteristics being repeated too much - Julian’s bankerness, richness, Oxford-graduateness, whiteness and so on… he’s also just not very nice. Ava too is just very meh and Edith, albeit the best, is also just okay bordering on nice but like I dunno I can’t really elaborate without lying. And being a character based novel you do need to have this level of complexity or lovableness to keep wanting to read on but I did not - I really didn’t enjoy reading this book it felt like I was being forced to.

Final point, the writing in this book makes Sally Rooney look subtle… and to me that says A LOT. I definitely got this ‘I’m flexing my English degree’ ‘I know lots of big, complex, intellectual words and I don’t care if you don’t also know them’ and ‘imma confuse these readers’ kinda vibe - I went off on one a bit and lost my train of thought but yhhh it’s pretentious. And this isn’t always a bad thing if you have the big brain energy vibe but I don’t really, at least not to Naoise Dolan’s extent. Furthermore I felt it had the pretentious and ‘gobly-goop’ writing style like Rooney on the various topics (with big discussions on arguably benign things but are important in the moment and to individuals and Yhh but not on the larger scale… my brain always fuzzes trying to sum up this type of writing) but without the real cusp or direct meaningfulness that has the lasting impact on you.

I could honestly talk a lot about this book so maybe it’s not that bad but… I still don’t like it. Okayish plot with some takeaways but predominantly unlikable characters in a pretentious writing style and some harmful stereotypes.

P.S. the plot was just like ehhh with lots of ‘why are you doing that?’ ‘Really? People talk and act like that? Really? Ummmm I have differing opinions’ and the logicality is questionable at some points too.

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