Travel Book Review: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

Exciting Times book by Naoise Dolan is the first person narrative of Ava, an Irish 22 year old who has moved to Hong Kong to teach English to rich children. This Exciting Times book review is from a travel and language perspective and what can be learned from Dolan’s witty commentary on society, politics and contemporary issues woven through a non-typical love story…ish.

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Places We Travel To in Exciting Times

• Hong Kong
• Mentions and comparisons between Ireland and England

Exciting Times Book Review 

We hear Ava’s thoughts and follow Ava’s perspective over a year in Hong Kong as an English teacher. Mostly though, she is the reader’s teacher as we learn about what Irish English is, the contrasts between Ireland and England, Hong Kong and Ireland, colonialism, views on British, important issues in today’s society, politics, rich and poor, English rich and Irish rich, culture, love, self-worth, doubt, anxiety, lust, money,

Ava lives with her banker friend Julian, for free, and her wit matches his contentment as they navigate what ‘relationship’ they have. When Julian leaves Hong Kong for work, Ava meets Edith with whom she can be herself and navigates a new, and only other, real connection in Hong Kong. Woven in the main plot are sub-plots of politics, class, authenticity, culture and language.

Travel Book Review Exciting Times

I love how subtle the setting is to the story. Through meeting places and food, we are reminded that we are in busy and humid Hong Kong. For example, a scene is set when they ‘walked to the LockCha Tea House, passing fountains and manicured hedges in Hong Kong park’ so we can imagine the greenery-relief in the chaotic metropolitan.

The food descriptions alone make me wanderlustful for a trip to Hong Kong: ‘huai shan and wolf berry seed soup, yellow cucumber salad, beancurd dumplings and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves’. Oh my, these exotic dishes are juxtaposed with the staples of most South East Asian cities: ‘our green tea arrived, then dim sum’.

I like the imagery of using local transportation with a local and how Edith laughs at Ava getting the tones wrong in Cantonese. I also learned that the language Hakka is spoken in Hong Kong and Edith’s Singaporean grandmother ‘maintained you didn’t need any other language in Hong Kong.’ Then Edith describes her as ‘the Hakka version of a British expat’ and that made me laugh.

Although I haven’t been to Hong Kong (yet), some of sentences about place take me right back to part of Asia. Particularly ‘a shop with sliding doors and no English name stocked postcards and dried meat’ and I was taken to corners of Chiang Mai that have these exact descriptions too.

I asked Naoise Dolan herself about why she chose Hong Kong as the setting for Exciting Times. Listen to her response and her interview about the novel on BBC Sounds here.

Exciting Times Taught Me About Irish Language

And I love language, lingo and local phrases!

While it isn’t a huge travel narrative about Hong Kong (and I think Hong Kong is the backdrop as to how Ava and Julian would cross paths), my favourite aspect of Exciting Times is the way in which Ava constantly tells us about Irish English, sayings from Ireland, how Irish phrases are part of her culture, how things are said in Dublin, facts on the Irish language and on being Irish.

Ava says ‘the dictionary would no equip these children for Dublin.’ Some things I have learned:

• ‘Plenty’ means that’s enough or too much.
• I’m still not 100% on what ‘mind yourself’ means.
• ‘Get fucked, ‘ smiling to remind him this was Irish for warmth’.
• ‘Irish English kept things after Brits dropped them. ‘Tings’ was incorrect, you needed to breathe and say ‘things’, but if you breathed for ‘what’ then that was quaint.’
• ‘It was like Ireland: all money was new money. Rich was posh and posh was rich.’
• Pronunciations of English words are different all over and we see this through Ava teaching the kids. She comments that the kids’ parents ‘weren’t paying for Dublin English.’ I don’t think they’d pay for Welsh English either, to be honest.
• That ‘on the scratcher’ means on the dole but ‘in the scratcher’ means in bed.
• If you’d just done something you’d be ‘after’ it. A bit like in Wales, when we are about to do something we’ll ‘do it now, in a minute.’
• Ava jokingly congratulates Edith ‘on not being robbed of your national language’ yet throughout the entire novel, I definitely feel this is only part-joking. And as a Welsh native, I strongly relate to this “joke”.

There’s lots more that you’ll learn about language when you read the book after this Exciting Times Naoise Dolan review. There’s some words I learned from my friends from Dublin like ‘grand’ and ‘your man’.

Related Post: Sayings Only Heard in South Wales

Length of Exciting Times Book

I read the hardback book of 275 pages and comfortably paced myself reading this. Although it was easy to pick up, it isn’t what I’d class as an ‘easy’ read because the language Dolan uses is intricate, clever and I had to re-read a few paragraphs to get the gist of what was being said. This just made me want to divulge the book even more and see what witty lines were coming next. I think listening to Exciting Times on Audible would be great, especially with the accents and language.

Also, the chapters are very short which for some reason makes me read more, faster.

Exciting Times Book Rating

I loved Exciting Times and could see within the first few chapters why it’s on lots of best books 2020 lists. I’m highly anticipating another Naoise Dolan book, I wonder if there could be another instalment of Ava going by Exciting Times book ending.

Stars = 4 / 5

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Exciting Times Quotes

‘Throughout college, back in Ireland, I’d kept a savings account that I charmingly termed ‘abortion fund’.

‘He’d voted for Brexit to have tighter borders, and was applying for an Irish passport to avoid being stopped at them.’

‘She chewed fish balls from a bamboo skewer between sentences.’

‘In Russia, Edith had said, you could get Putin’s face on anything. Vodka, bread, you name it. In Hong Kong, the same was true of Hello Kitty.’

‘I tried to jaywalk at a crossing, but she pulled me back.’ (This reminds me so much of Melbourne road rules).

‘We both found it hilarious that Brits thought their international image was one of flaccid tea-loving Hugh Grantish butterfingery.’

‘We got street food and bet on horses at Happy Valley. She took me for bubble tea on a long hilly street packed with convenience stores.’

‘Maybe it didn’t matter how many languages you you learned. You always brought the flavour of your first.’

‘One could hardly plant a Celtic soul in Canary Wharf.’

Buy Exciting Times Book:
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