![]() ![]() Indeed, the book is populated by similar quips meant to signal the protagonist’s own self-awareness. In Naoise Dolan’s debut novel, Exciting Times, twenty-two-year-old Irish expat Ava gets a job at a TEFL school in Hong Kong, where she is encouraged to correct children who use common features of Hong Kong English-like adding “lah” for emphasis (“no lah”) the way that Irish people add “sure.” In reality, she’s been hired to teach British English, something that she’s no more qualified to do than a local English speaker-except that she’s white, and works at an institution that “only hired white people but made sure not to put that in writing.” It was here that I began to grow suspicious-in a book filled with such terse and intelligent writing, I feared this type of off-the-cuff virtue signaling would characterize the entirety of Dolan’s novel. ![]()
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