Soft Core

Starred review from October 21, 2024
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.

Starred review from December 15, 2024
A knockout of a second novel from the author ofOola (2017). Ruth is 27 and adrift when we meet her. She has a master's degree she doesn't know what to do with. She's living in the Mission with her ex-boyfriend, Dino, a ketamine dealer who enjoys wearing women's lingerie. And she's dancing at a club where she has assumed the name Baby--not because she has any sort of fully fleshed-out stage persona but, rather, because that's a thing men call her. Narrating her life in a way that feels aimless but not quite random, she tells the story of how she has arrived at this place. She remembers learning about sex from her more worldly friend Mazzy, a young woman "forever marked by being the first student at her private all-girls school to need a real bra." Ruth reminisces about past lovers and the substances that shaped their relationships. And she describes the men she meets at work, delineating their needs and appetites with an anthropological detachment that is not without empathy. Dino remains, though, the emotional center of her universe, and when he goes missing, she unravels. Newell writes about sex work and drugs and what people--some people--used to call the demimonde without moralizing or reducing her characters to grim allegories. This book is, among other things, funny and sometimes very sweet, and Newell gives shape to Ruth's chaotic life with gorgeously precise prose. When she sees the ballet-dancer daughter of a wealthy man with whom she's having an affair, Ruth thinks, "She was the luckiest girl in the whole wide world and she didn't even care. She wore her hair up in a bun, her neck cool and pale as a halved pear." There's so much longing packed into that handful of words! "The hours swooped and gooped around us like fallen ice-cream cones." Out of context, this does not seem like a great sentence. But within a swirling mess of metaphors recounting doing ketamine with Dino and falling in love, it approaches the sublime. Real and raw and exquisitely well crafted.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2025
Ruth, a lonely and flailing 27-year-old, has grown accustomed to San Francisco's nightlife. Working as a stripper at one of the local clubs, she shares a life with Dino, the ex-lover whom Ruth still, begrudgingly, loves very much. When Dino goes missing, Ruth is left unmoored. Her search for him takes her further into the underground and slowly pushes her to the edge of sanity. Obsession--both romantic and platonic--is at the core of the novel, as Ruth struggles with the desire to enmesh herself within her relationships. To demonstrate the flimsy line between reality and fantasy, Newell (Oola, 2017) turns to maximalism. The language frequently veers into melodrama--many lines would be lyrical in isolation but aren't given the space to shine. While some elements don't pay off as spectacularly as they could, the plot has suspenseful elements and a good sense of pace. Through her own expertise as a performer, Newell offers an intense and compelling character study.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.