When Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meager salary could never allow. Since she left Dublin, she’s been spending her days teaching English to rich children-she’s been assigned the grammar classes because she lacks warmth-and her nights avoiding petulant roommates in her cramped apartment. This cover was too aesthetically pleasing for me.Īnyways, I’ve rambled enough, so let’s get into this book review, shall we?Īn intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyerĪva moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but oh man the psychology of color really gets me over here. I added it to my Goodreads back when the longlist was announced because I was compelled by the cover.

I have not read Sally Rooney nor do I particularly care to in my current mindset. I think it was longlisted for some big book prize? I don’t remember which one exactly (editing me now confirms that it was the Women’s Prize in Fiction over in the UK), and it was often compared to the work of Sally Rooney. There’d been a lot of hype around this book.

But, to be quite honest, Zauner’s and Ferrante’s works had much greater success in capturing my attention compared to Exciting Times. So while prepping for my vacation to Tennessee, I downloaded the audiobook and added it to my rotation of audiobooks for the week: Exciting Times, Crying in H Mart, and The Lying Life of Adults kept me intellectually fed the entire trip. I found this book through Libby, which, surprisingly considering how new it was, didn’t have a waitlist of people wanting to read it for themselves.

Exciting times dolan