Hotline
Ratings4
Average rating3.8
A vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration.
It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator.
All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in them—marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.
Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid elegy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Canada, bringing the era’s systemic challenges into the current moment through this deeply endearing portrait of struggle, perseverance, and bonding.
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A solid story about the aftermath of war, loss and having one's life being entirely uprooted featuring a very compelling and human character. Muna is endearing without coming across as too perfect to be real and her story is multilayered in a way that makes it come across as very real.
Inspired by the author's mother, Hotline is the story of a single-parent fleeing war-torn Lebanon in the 80ies to settle in Montreal. We follow along as Muna and her son hit all sorts of hurdles in their new life, from appropriate winter jackets and first ice storms to the difficulty of not having the right French accent to find a job. I liked how day-to-day the story was, and how hopeful a picture it paints. Canada Reads is a great thing all around.
