Exciting Times

Oh the Hong Kong expat life, taking up the mid-level escalators, going on trips to Lamma island, drinking in LKF or TST. Where all locals you meet have studied abroad, all expats work in finance, and everyone generally earns way too much money and is obsessed with fashion brands. Our Irish heroine Ava is young and new in town, as she falls into a relationship with banker Julian with whom she moves in, despite him never committing to her. The two bond over acerbic humor, their level of detachment, and give off a very vapid posh vibe. It took me half the book to start to like them a little. And then Edith enters the picture, a trendy young lawyer, who's constantly responding to work emails on her phone, and Ava starts to slowly analyse and compare the feelings she has for the two people in her life. What Dolan tries to do with explorations of linguistics through Ava's language classes, feels very similar to how Sally Rooney used digital communicaiton in [b:Conversations with Friends 32187419 Conversations with Friends Sally Rooney https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500031338l/32187419.SY75.jpg 52827120] and Elif Batuman used translation in [b:The Idiot 30962053 The Idiot Elif Batuman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474782288l/30962053.SY75.jpg 51577226]. I don't think Dolan succeeds as well as the other two though. There's a faint thread of class, politics and economy woven into this that I really enjoyed. What the 2008 financial crisis has done to Ireland, the soul-lessness of the financial sector (Julian's only interest seems to be in making money), HK's council election, arrest of student protestors, Ireland's upcoming abortion vote ... I would have liked her to dig a bit deeper into those. Though this probably would have become a different book then. I enjoyed this as a nostalgia trip.