Soft Core
A Novel
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4.3 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Vivid . . . Exhilarating . . . Soft Core is pacey and rich, full of verve, drama and detail.” —The New York Times Book Review
A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.
Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers’ secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it—until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.
Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves—through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . .
A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Newell (Oola) delivers a crackerjack novel of a sex worker who comes undone after her ex-boyfriend's disappearance. Ruth, the 27-year-old narrator, mainly uses her stripper name, Baby. She rates herself a seven out of 10, and her life feels "loose, like favorite panties with the elastic stretched out." She lives in San Francisco with her ex Dino, a ketamine dealer with a dangerous side (he owns nunchucks) and a soft side (he loves Dolly Parton, secretly wears women's lingerie, and dotes on his rescue dogs). Their breakup was amicable, and they remain close. When Dino goes missing, Baby tries not to panic, remembering how he'd once told her, "If something ever happens to me... don't call the cops. Just sit tight and be cool." She takes another job as a dominatrix to fill the time, and in her sleep deprivation, she starts hallucinating Dino's face on strangers. She's also rattled by a new dancer at the club, the prettier Emeline, who copies her in unnerving ways, first by borrowing a pair of her panties and wearing them every night on stage, then by using the same perfume. Newell makes the most of Baby's unreliable narration, conveying her deteriorating mental state as she struggles to hold onto her sense of self, and the wild ride is bolstered by striking prose and memorable imagery. It's a stellar entry in the literature of unhinged women, up there with Mona Awad's Bunny.
