In her column “Rage on the Page,” Melisa Guleryuz ’27 reviews books about anger in women’s literature.

This review contains spoilers.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

Brittany Newell’s “Soft Core” is a novel that slithers through the neon-lit underbelly of San Francisco — wrapping itself around themes of identity, power and the desperate, sometimes delusional, pursuit of connection. 

The novel plunges readers into the chaotic mind of Ruth, a disillusioned graduate turned stripper whose spiral into sex work, drug-fueled obsession and self-reinvention plays out like a fever dream. Newell writes with a sharp, unrelenting voice, making “Soft Core” at once intoxicating, disorienting and deeply, achingly human.  

From the first page, it’s clear that Ruth is not your typical protagonist. She is funny, self-aware and self-destructive in equal measure, throwing herself into an industry she barely understands with an almost religious fervor. 

Ruth first appears as Baby Blue, a stripper whose charm and brazenness mask a gnawing emptiness.  The contradictions of her persona become apparent early on: “It would take me an hour or more to stop flirting with everyone, to stop being Baby and return to Just Me, Ruth in her clogs and thick socks,” she narrates. The sharp juxtaposition between Baby Blue and “Just Me, Ruth” speaks to a central tension in “Soft Core:” the ability (or inability) to separate one’s true self from a persona. But what makes this book so haunting is that Ruth doesn’t just play Baby Blue — she doesn’t know who she is without her.  

Then there’s Dino, Ruth’s ex-boyfriend who disappears early in the novel, triggering Ruth’s descent into paranoia and obsession. Dino is more of a specter than a character — a blurry, unreliable memory that Ruth can’t let go of. As Ruth starts seeing his face everywhere, reality and hallucination merge. The novel takes on a dreamlike quality. Her world is made up of mirrors — strip club mirrors, bathroom mirrors, the distorted reflections in the eyes of clients — where she searches for something solid but only finds herself, splintered and refracted.  

Newell’s greatest strength is her ability to write about the body — both Ruth’s and those around her — in an unsettlingly intimate way. She captures the feeling of inhabiting a body that is both yours and not yours, of being watched, desired and commodified while still craving genuine connection through intimacy with her clients. 

Ruth’s relationship with her body shifts constantly. Sometimes, it’s a tool she wields. Other times, it’s just another object to be used: “All other times I was fond of my body like you’d be fond of a favorite mug — I liked it enough to use it every day but not enough to talk about it,” she narrates. This casual indifference is devastating, especially in the context of a novel that explores the ways women are expected to understand and control their own desirability. 

“Soft Core” refuses to make simplistic moral judgments about sex work, which is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Unlike other fictionalized accounts of the industry that either glamorize or condemn, Newell presents sex work as a job — one that is both liberating and dehumanizing, empowering and exhausting.  

Ruth isn’t just trying to navigate the club — she’s also unraveling in the real world. Her paranoia deepens as she becomes Miss Sunday, a dominatrix who caters to wealthy clients with elaborate fetishes. This shift allows her to see another side of men, one that surprises her: “After a while, I had to repent: I was wrong about men. They too liked to be safe and warm,” she narrates. 

It’s small, startling observations like this that make “Soft Core” so much more than a story about stripping and survival. Ruth’s journey is about longing, the strange and often desperate ways people seek comfort and the impossibility of truly knowing someone else.  

Newell also excels at writing about physical spaces, particularly the strip club, which feels both hyperreal and surreal and is rendered in prose so visceral you can almost taste the stale air:  “He wasn’t wrong: ever since I’d started dancing, I couldn’t shake the smell of the club from my hair… I, on the other hand, reeked of cigarettes, hotel sheets, cramped male sweat,” Newell writes. The language is unglamorous yet intoxicating. It neither romanticizes Ruth’s world nor vilifies it. Instead, Newell lets the reader sit in the discomfort of the in-between, where Ruth exists — never fully in control, never fully powerless.  

If “Soft Core” has a weakness, it’s that some of its more surreal elements occasionally overshadow character development. Ruth’s obsession with Dino is gripping, but it feels like a loose thread that is unraveling faster than the novel can keep up with. Certain relationships, particularly with other dancers, feel underexplored, as if Ruth is so consumed by her own perception of reality that she doesn’t fully engage with the people around her. Yet maybe that’s the point — Ruth is constantly on the brink of something, but she never quite arrives.  

Ultimately, “Soft Core” is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, the roles we play, and the parts of ourselves we lose along the way. Newell has crafted a raw and deeply unsettling debut. It’s a book for anyone who has ever felt untethered, anyone who has searched for meaning in the wrong places and anyone who has ever wanted — desperately — to be seen.