Thank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Representations: https://trello.com/c/DxOnOcXG

Short and Snappy but a very well constructed dialogue! The entire novella is written as a dialogue, the only words are spoken ones. It managed to stay pretty realistic and flowed surprisingly well. Things did feel slightly off, but that's intentional due to the setting and what's going on.

There are few characters, the 2 in dialogue are the main character and the owner of the hotel/only employee/bell boy. The rest are through the story told, only 2 others being prominent - The wife, and the neighbour in the motel. Honestly really liked how the characters were written. In such short time you got to know them all quite well. Saying much about any of them will certainly spoil too much however.

The story was quite interesting, and while it was very slow at first, since it's a novella that didn't last too long. By the time it felt like it was starting to drag it was already like halfway through and started to pick up haha. It does get pretty bleak and tense, and towards the end it does get kinda depressing (content warning spoiler at the bottom, this is a book that needs it), but it handles it pretty alright? I think because it's a novella and because it cannot linger on scenes too long it's mostly alright in what it does near the end. The ending itself though, while it was good it did mostly leave me feeling a bit confused? I'm not entirely sure what the ending was, but that could just be me being dumb. I understand what happened, but not really what happens next if that makes sense, or why things had to go the way they did.

Minor spoilers but content warnings below:

Content warning for on-page suicide and animal (pet, essentially) death.