English Toss on Planet Andong
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A biting black comedy that centres on three hopeless expat teachers.
Every year thousands of people travel to faraway lands to teach English as a foreign language. The fools.
One such expat is Paul Taylor, a heartbroken Aussie looking for a fresh start in a South Korean classroom. The lack of training isn't much of a help, but it's the baffling natives and unhinged flatmates that really start to convince him he's crash-landed in another galaxy...
Packed with over the top characters, English Toss is a demented sitcom of a novel that revels in the extremes of expat dislocation.
"The author has an excellent ear for dialogue and some of his set-pieces are laugh out loud funny... Dave Franklin probably won't be the last author to offer his take on Korean life - he might just be the most caustic and honest, though." - Groove Korea magazine
"Startlingly different." - Australian Crime Fiction website
"...the writing has pace, and is hilarious in places. An expose on Korean culture on and ESL teaching this book is not. But as a simple black comedy, English Toss is worth reading." - The Korea Herald
Dave Franklin is the author of ten novels.
Dave Franklin
Dave Franklin is a Brit who lives Down Under. He has also written ten novels ranging from dark comedy and horror to crime and hardcore porn. His naughty work includes Looking for Sarah Jane Smith (2001), Begin the Madness: The Straitjacket Blues Trilogy (2014), The Muslim Zombies (2018) & Welcome to Wales, Girls: A Violent Odyssey of Pornographic Filth (2018).
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Reviews for English Toss on Planet Andong
11 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I won this book through Member Giveaways and it looked interesting but I didn't expect that much from it. I loved it, enjoyable and very funny from start to finish. It's not very often a book actually makes me laugh out loud. I won another book from this author, Manic Streets of Perth, and I'm definitely looking forward to starting on it.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book sounded promising and it seems to work well for people -- but not for me I'm afraid. I didn't find any of the characters interesting enough to keep reading to see what happened to them and found the whole tone of the book off-putting. It's not often that I stop reading a book, but I just couldn't finish this one; the protagonists' world view is one I can neither empathise with nor share. His whole world is dreary, dingy and alienating, from the mucous-covered students to his misanthropic flatmate, and his view of the people and places around him is depressing.Apparently a love it or hate it book...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I won this book through Member Giveaways and it looked interesting but I didn't expect that much from it. I loved it, enjoyable and very funny from start to finish. It's not very often a book actually makes me laugh out loud. I won another book from this author, Manic Streets of Perth, and I'm definitely looking forward to starting on it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I received this book through the Members Giveaway system. As an ex teacher I was attracted to requesting it because of the blurb describing the book as one man's experience of teaching ESL in Korea feeling as if he had landed on another planet. Having successfully negotiated the use of sometimes alienating Korean language terms within the first few pages, it settled into an absorbing yarn sprinkled with humour, sadness, splatterings of pop culture references and above all the comedic darkness and drudgery of being landed in what appeared to be a totally disfunctional environment."Instead, the world had been populated by runny-nosed brats, mute Korean drones, dead grannies, brain damaged novelists and part time hookers with English degrees." Yep! That says it all!Behind the outrageous antics of anti-hero Billy and the 'so bland they were almost non existent' Korean characters, lurked a tale of a man, Paul Taylor, trying to deal with the damage to his marriage by his cheating wife and the hurt he was suffering. Certainly the book dealt with the horrors of teaching in less than desirable circumstances, but other than to serve as a warning to prospective ESL teachers n foreign countries it was more an exploration of damaged people and the ways in which they fought to survive.I found myself checking back over passages on occasions when I realised I had recognised familiar lines from songs....Meatloaf, Pink Floyd, BoomTown Rats .... sometimes acknowledged with in the flow of dialogue, other times not. This device acted in some way to bring the reader back from the brink of believing, as Paul was beginning to, that you were on another planet. Referencing of popular music artists, authors and literary works held you firmly on planet Earth.Each of the Western characters was given a voice that was accessible and believable. However, I'm not sure that I have ever heard an Australian use the word "munt" as was peppered through the dialogue attributed to Perth-ite Micheal. It grated...so I resorted to Google and discovered it's place in the Urban Dictionary as a seemingly 'legitimate' part of the Australian lexicon. Despite having established its bona fides, I still found it sat uncomfortably on the page.The brain damaged novelist Denzil's language must have been such fun to write...it challenged the reader to actually give his written word voice so as to hear the way Franklin had successfully managed to mangle the thought process and create a nonsensical yet understandable speech.At times I found myself wondering at the darker sexually discordant mutterings lurking behind the scenes - is it just me reading something that may not have been there or was the author deliberately flirting with homo eroticism, paedophilia, BDSM and fetishism just to keep us poised expectantly waiting to see where he would take us?Recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I won this book through Member Giveaways and it looked interesting but I didn't expect that much from it. I loved it, enjoyable and very funny from start to finish. It's not very often a book actually makes me laugh out loud. I won another book from this author, Manic Streets of Perth, and I'm definitely looking forward to starting on it.