"Sometimes I was good at him, sometimes he was good at me, sometimes we were good at each other, and sometimes neither of us was good at anything."
Exciting times is the story of Ava, an Irish 20 something who makes less than minimum wage teaching students English while living in Hong Kong. She finds herself in a relationship that is both unfulfilling and in very subtle ways, almost destructive in nature. She cannot leave this relationship because she is addicted to the way her partner perceives her. Instead of leaving the relationship, she finds herself in a secondary relationship/affair while her partner is away on an extended business trip.
I have a high threshold for unlikeable characters, and I have a high threshold for character driven books without much of a plot to drive the story forward, but it turns out, I do not have much of a tolerance for novels that combine both of these elements.
This isn't a plot driven novel, the intensity of the reading experience is left completely to Eva's power struggle with who she really is when she isn't with someone that sees her as important.
Two or three times I almost put Exciting Times down because I was not enjoying it. I kept reading and wondering why I was still reading and towards the end it finally hit me after being personally attacked by this quote:
"Everyone does that, Ava", she said. You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special- which is fair, who doesn't- but you won't allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you're especially bad."
Eva is obsessed with belonging. She is chasing the experiences of being important enough to feel known, adored, and relied upon. She assumes often that the reason she has not experienced this in relationship is because something is wrong with her. She cannot identify what the wrong something is and I would argue that she never does in the pages of this story. She cannot see that the real problem is the way she holds people at a clinical distance by using inauthenticity to buoy her own sense of self. I couldn't put this book down because this struggle is such a relatable battle as both a human and more specifically, as a woman.
Exciting times isn't going to be a "stand out" read for me this year, but it is one of those novels that will stick with me in some way because of the deeply personal level of connection I felt to the complexity of emotions. I really applaud Dolan's ability to drive a novel so unflinchingly on the back of insecurities we have all tried to hide in messy, dark corners.
⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 stars
Reviewer note: I was given this book free of charge by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
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