Soft Core Audiobook By Brittany Newell cover art

Soft Core

A Novel

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Soft Core

By: Brittany Newell
Narrated by: Christine Lakin
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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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 San Francisco Women's Fiction Psychological Genre Fiction Fiction Literary Fiction Heartfelt Funny Inspiring
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Critic reviews

Advance Praise

"Soft Core is a beautiful fever dream, a slippery, captivating pleasure, a love story stuffed inside a wadded nylon stocking. It’s a novel that wants to get close to you. It wants to bite your neck; it’s the actual promise of a hickey. I can’t remember the last book I read that was even half as tender. I ate it up."
—KRISTEN ARNETT, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
All stars
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Great narration- i enjoyed the mystery and pathos of Ruthy’s apparent coming of age. What I didn’t enjoy was the seemingly unredeemed cruelty toward the women of the story. I’d go so far as to suggest the author has some internalized mysogeny.

An honest and self-effacing portrait of a very troubled young woman.

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This novel is psychologically rich, layered with subtext, and quietly thought-provoking. However, unless you’ve personally spent time in the industry, some readers may find the story itself a bit weak or lacking in traditional narrative structure.

Regarding the comments about the “lack of narrative,”

I agree to a point. There could have been more of a defined story. But in the industry, there is a real dissolving of identity. You’re constantly playing whatever role others want from you in that moment. It’s exhausting. The open-ended, unresolved structure actually felt accurate. The mini side quests, fleeting characters, and loose events mirror the lived experience. There are also strong themes of projection throughout.

How it reads

Brittany Newell writes like a poet. The prose feels dreamlike and surreal, almost like drifting through a lucid haze. When ketamine is mentioned, it oddly confirms the atmosphere already present. She leans heavily into metaphor, which I personally enjoyed.

Ruth / Baby / Sunday

She’s not a typical portrayal of an exotic dancer, but she’s believable. I’ve worked with girls similar to her. I liked her overall tone, though she carries a lot of pain and negativity beneath moments of melancholy.

Spoiler — critical comment

I struggled with how Ruth treated Sofia/Emelian. It’s psychologically rich, but frustrating. Ruth longs for family and stability, and her jealousy toward Sofia reflects that wound.

Sofia represents something very real in the industry. She becomes the ideal vessel for male fantasy, but she embodies it too well. This creates tension with other women. We’re used to seeing billboard beauty at a distance, then feeling grounded by the normalness of the room. Sofia disrupts that. She becomes the billboard inside the space.
Her innocence and sweetness only intensify the reaction. If she had been colder or harsher, she might have been better received. Instead, she just needed a friend. But her beauty combined with kindness becomes isolating.

The men pick her apart body part by body part.

Then the women do the same.

Everything is filtered through the male gaze, on both sides.

An honest review from an exotic dancer with about ten years in the industry.

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The writing was fine but the story was incredibly boring. When the book ended I found myself grateful that it was over, and completely underwhelmed. The story went nowhere.

boring book

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1. I loved the writing in this book
2. I love an unreliable narrator
3. I enjoyed listening to this book

AND

4. I had no clue what was happening for a lot of this book and the ending didn’t do much to clear that up

Many things can be true at once…

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I loved the writing for what I thought might be a tired subject. It does the Bay Area justice and really breathed light into the freaks of SF…a huge part of what I love about the bay. The arc of the story was open to interpretation in a way that was perfectly done and wrapped up nicely :)

Delicious, Savory Writing

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