An unhinged, wickedly funny exploration of one woman and her missing boyfriend. Impossible to put down, clever and shocking. This is a must read.

This is Soft Core, feminine, suggestive, a slice of sex worker life for the vibes girlies who want to explore the emotional side of the transactional pay-the-bills job. Soft Core reminded me of a Sodastream, a flat baseline with occasional bursts of fizz from a high pressure cylinder , the work is pedestrian, repetitive, and I loved Baby’s blunt chat and matter of factness. It reminded me of the movie Anora without all the shouty scenes.

Ruth dances in the club as Baby and is lost in life, she lives with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a drug dealer, who has gone missing. Soft Core is not a plot driven book about finding Dino it instead focuses on loneliness and what Baby learns about vulnerability as a basis for intimacy in relationships with interesting conversations about gender and gaze. Soft Core has a super lush languid feel and is one for the lit-fic girls, especially with that ending.

Thank you to the 4theEstate publishers, and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this in exchange for my honest thoughts. I know I will be thinking about this one for a long time after reading.

*Softcore* by Brittany Newell follows the story of a young woman working as an exotic dancer when her ex boyfriend goes missing. However, despite an intriguing premise and stunning book cover the novel falls flat with underdeveloped characters and an inconsistent narrative. The pacing feels off, and the emotional depth that could have elevated the story is missing. Overall, it's a missed opportunity, earning just 2 stars.

Thanks NetGalley for the ARC!

Soft Core by Brittany Newell is a brutally honest and darkly captivating story of a young woman’s search for herself amid the chaos of the sexual underground. Ruth stuck in a life she didn’t anticipate, finds herself living in a Victorian house with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with peculiar habits. As Ruth navigates the drudgery of her life, she begins working at a strip club, adopting the persona of Baby Blue—a seductive figure caught between the superficiality of the crypto bro world, outcasts, and a past she can’t escape.

Her descent into this nocturnal underworld of fast money, seductive allure, and sleepless nights takes a sharper turn when Dino vanishes. This loss sends Ruth on a quest across the misty hills of San Francisco, through dive bars, bus depots, and even a BDSM dungeon, as she unravels the complexities of love, longing, and identity. Along the way, she meets a series of bizarre and unforgettable characters, each of them as fractured and lost as she is, and each adds a layer to her unravelling journey.

Newell’s narrative is raw, unapologetic, and at times hallucinogenic. The story pulls no punches, painting Ruth’s world in vivid, chaotic strokes, making for a fiercely compelling, sometimes unsettling, reading experience. What stands out in Soft Core is the brash, unfiltered honesty of Ruth’s journey. Through her eyes, we witness the raw underbelly of the human condition: power, fantasy, love, and loss all intermingle in a desperate search for meaning.

The book is absorbing in its messiness—the kind that grips you, making you feel every twist and turn of Ruth’s desperate and unpredictable life. Her unrestrained voice connects with the reader on a profound level, and the emotional impact of the story lingers long after the final page. Soft Core is a wild, darkly funny, and poignant tale about trying to find yourself when the world around you feels like it’s falling apart.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

Soft Core

Very much a book where the vibes are the plot. You get ultimately a melancholic and hazy merging of days, whilst Baby/Ruth is unraveling.

It was quite nice to see the authenticity and even mundanity of sex work.

Overall I did enjoy!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher
4/5 ⭐️

What a book! Beautifully written and whimsical, it's everything I wanted and more. It's a little less mystery than I expected from the synopsis, but I still loved it. It balanced the crass themes with its' elegant prosa perfectly.

Soft Core by Britany Newell is an atmospheric, dreamy coming-of-age novel that unfolds like a hazy lullaby—slow, melancholic, and immersive. The writing is poignant yet restrained, perfectly capturing Ruth’s grief and loneliness. While it lacked a strong hook, its quiet, gritty exploration of desire and sex work felt raw and real. I wanted more plot around Dino!!!! A bedtime story for the introspective.

a solid 2.5 for me - because of the "plot" - lovely character writing!

Thank you NetGalley & ‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC!

A solid 3.5 stars. I wavered a lot on my feelings about this book. The first half I really struggled through. It rankled me the way it seemed to be doing too much in the sense that attempted shock value was the only lasting impression I was getting. It felt like a story you'd seen (basically Anora on paper) and heard a million times before ("lonely sex worker wrestling with deep rooted issues, trying to discover herself") with the only things to stand out being bits so crass or debasing that it left you unsettled. It wasn't working for me because it didn't feel artful. Additionally, the writing felt amateur and the story drawn out. However...about 60% of the way through its like something clicked for Newell in her writing process. The second half had some really beautiful and profound prose. It started to feel like there was real substance being covered and I started to really get a feeling for Baby's character and the deep seated emotions she was experiencing. It really held my attention till the last page and even now I find myself wondering and considering, thinking back on some of the various sections of story. While overall the story ping ponged around a bit much and I think the writing could use some refining/practice, my lasting impression is that the guts of this story are really worth examining.

A verbose, unique slice-of-life novel which reminded me of Fight Club (for its visceral unwillingness to shy away from the gross) and Money (for the sometimes unlikable characters, and break-neck pace of interior narration), but which remained stubbornly and gloriously feminine.

Ruth, or Baby if you're naughty (and she is), is a character entirely of her own: a bed-rotting, girl-dinnering, drug-abusing, stripper with at once a solid and entirely malleable sense of self. Stuck in a life that is full, and going nowhere, where she is both loved and unloved, suffocated and lonely, desired and repulsive, Ruth increasingly loses control, whilst perhaps gaining more power than ever before.

A bizarre read, which will stay with me for a long time. I am not totally confident on my star rating here, but I recognise an entirely unique, bold, and confident writing style when I see it, so if for nothing else than Newell's exceptional grasp of language and voice, 4 stars.

For fans of sugar baby and new animal! I really loved it

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to review

4.5 stars!

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

I enjoyed this trippy, dreamy little novel a LOT! I don’t think I fully grasped the ending (were we supposed to?) but I enjoyed the ride there so much that it barely matters.

Ruth, or Baby, is a stripper and dominatrix living with her (amicable) ex boyfriend and their dogs in San Francisco. Newell works/worked as a dominatrix, so her depiction of the sex work industry is imbued with such a staggering authenticity. It felt like reading someone’s diary, almost voyeuristic. I absolutely loved Ruth, her vulnerability. The way Newell described her relationships with Dino (who mysteriously goes missing later in the book), the pups, Ophelia, was just so alive. You feel like you know them. And her nights at the club and shifts in the dungeon were just fantastique, glitter practically falls out of the pages. It’s gritty and tender, hard and soft, I just loved it.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this advanced reader's copy and the opportunity to this early. Review has been posted on Waterstones and Amazon.

🪩 Soft Care / Brittany Newell 💋

Wow, that was a wild ride! I’ve seen some reviews of this book that describe it as “vibes over plot”, and whilst I think that’s true - the vibes are strong due to the lush and vivid writing - there is still plot. It just doesn’t come together in a neat bow at the end.

The reader essentially witnesses the slow unravelling of Baby, a sex worker whose drug dealing, cross dressing ex boyfriend suddenly disappears, leaving her alone in their home.

As Baby searches for him (metaphorically rather than physically) she descends further into San Francisco’s underground of dive bars, strip clubs and BDSM dungeons. As she sees Dino (the ex) in different men, she starts to reevaluate their relationship and her life over the past five years, leading up to her 28th birthday.

The book explores themes of loneliness, desire, love and childhood trauma. It sounds heavy, but moves through in a dreamlike state with Baby such a self-proclaimed “easy going” person that she doesn’t dwell on the bad things that have happened to her - mainly because she thinks she’s too average to be desirable if she shows her true sadness.

The book is tender, brutal and unsettling. There’s blankets and dogs and hand dipped candles… but there’s also aching loneliness, a suicidal client named “Nobody”, restless dawns and lost friendships.

I really enjoyed this book and found the fantasy element could be extended to so many parts of it.

It’s dark and light and luscious. I surprised myself as I usually like a conclusion, but with this book everything that came before was worth the open ending, which also worked in the context of the story and our unreliable / spiralling narrator.

This book gives sexy vibes throughout, it is enjoyable. However, it felt a bit under-edit and I think the execution can be better. Not so much of a storyline but I believe that's intentional. I often find it confusing and wanted to find answers. Unfortunately I found Dino's reappearance not making sense, and the ending linking to the book title slightly contrived.

Thank you Netgalley for the arc.

This is a dazzling, raw, and unfiltered fever dream.
Soft Core follows a sex worker navigating the disappearance of her boyfriend. But don’t expect a thriller.
Instead, it unfolds as a hypnotic stream of consciousness, slice of life where memory, desire, and survival blur into an intimate, unreliable narration.

I'd recommend it to readers who are drawn to introspective storytelling over plot.

This is a messy book - gloriously, intentionally, messy - like life, and love, itself. First, I must say that Newell can write: her prose is zippy and smart; she knows how to use similes and metaphors so that they illuminate her writing: 'they wore their fantasies like girdles, an everyday secret' - catching that sense of restriction and liberation, of what's hidden beneath the surface, behind the mendacities of social identity; or the layered used of 'soft core' from its sex work category to the perfume worn by Baby in its heart-shaped bottle - to the importance of vulnerability as the only true basis for intimacy.

I'm always fascinated by books that explore sex work and the corollaries of power, consumption, gender and the gaze. But the best look beyond the surface of what it means to be, here, a stripper or a dancer (I'm thinking of [book:No Touching|57732481] which plays in a similar space) so that the club or, later, the BDSM house are sites of revelation beyond their surface and literal function.

With wonderful textual control, we follow Ruth through love, friendship, desperation and breakdown. We're never quite sure how far we can believe her, especially as she starts seeing Dino in all the men she meets, and there's a ramping of tension in the last quarter or so of the book that had me feverishly turning the pages.

And where we end up - no spoilers - is an ending that is also a beginning and an opening. I loved, loved, loved this book and have immediately put Newell's debut, [book:Oola|30199417], on my TBR.

Many thanks to 4th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley - I'll be surprised if this isn't one of my books of 2025!

Soft Core by Brittany Newell captures an endearingly flawed character well and the writing is vivid and fresh.

Ruth is a stripper called baby, she’s living in a shared flat with her drug dealer ex boyfriend dino, when all of a sudden he goes missing. While waiting for Dino to come back to her, she makes a new friend who turns out to be connected to someone she knows.

I’m not 100% sure this book was written for the likes of me. That being said I have thought about it since finishing and for the most part I did enjoy it. I’m just not sure if that’s because it’s left so open and I didn’t get the answers I wanted or because it’s stuck with me more than I thought it would.

It’s a bit like a fever dream, I’m not sure what was real, what wasn’t, what actually happened and what didn’t.

If you don’t mind a book that leaves everything to your interpretation then you will love this, but for me I need them questions answered.

Thank you so much to @netgalley and @4thestatebooks for giving me the opportunity to read this for an honest review.

3.5 stars
I did enjoy this, although I do think the marketing is very misleading. It's not a 'hunt' for her missing ex boyfriend. It's a slice of life stream of consciousness style literary fiction. I liked reading from her pov as I do like an unhinged narrator. I just thought as the book kept going on that it got a bit lazy and sloppy. Do NOT read this book if you can't handle loose ends when it comes to plot, as this book has a LOT of that. If you go into this book with the right expectations, I think you'll enjoy it. A 20 something woman dealing with being lost and grief and the tribulations of sex work.

don't go into this expecting any sort of self-reflection. this book falls exclusively into the category of vibes, no plot, no emotional growth. unfortunately, that made it very much not for me.