Hello friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m posting my review of Dimitri Nasrallah’s novel, Hotline.

This book was short-listed for Canada Reads 2023.

Hotline by: Dimitri Nasrallah: It’s the year 1986 and Muna Heddad has fled to Montreal with her son, Omar, from Lebanon to escape the war. Her husband was kidnapped three years ago and is presumed to be dead. Off to start a new life in Canada, she hopes to be a French teacher, but that proves to be more difficult than she expected. No one wants to hire her because she’s a foreigner, so she finds a job at a weight loss company, answering phones on their hotline. This novel was moving in how much adversity the characters had to face and overcome. Even though this story took place in the late 80s, this still showed the struggles that immigrants have to face, and felt relevant even to today. This felt very mundane in structure, but that’s what made this plot work really well; it was able to show the little things in the characters’ lives. This was very fast-paced, which was surprising for a novel that dealt with the ordinary day-to-day. The reader found themselves flipping through the story, wanting to know more and just be a part of the characters’ lives, especially our main one, Muna. She really made a name for herself in her small network. It was always a joy to watch her succeed in something, particularly after all the heartbreak she had been through and was still going through. The reader liked how the author also added a layer to her character where she was having conversations with her husband’s ghost. It not only gave us more backstory to her, but it gave another dimension to the plot because we didn’t know if her husband was really alive or dead, so it added a level of mystery to the story. The side characters were just as lovely to read because each of them had their own struggles, which made Muna feel like she wasn’t alone in her own endeavours for a better life. Overall, this was a quiet novel, but one that was well written and felt very true to real life; it also felt inspiring and hopeful for people who seek out new, better lives.