Note that this is suggested for people curious about the world of Anora, not people who want to read something like the actual movie.
This book is likely to frustrate some readers if they don’t know what to expect. My guess is many folks will come to this looking for a trippy missing person mystery featuring a sex-worker-turned-amateur-sleuth. That’s not what this is at all.
Yeah there is a missing person aspect to it and that sort of draws the character down to a rabbit hole. Yeah there are thriller aspects that question whether or not to affirm the MC’s paranoia. But by-and-large, this is a Zoomer meditation (probably semi-autobiographical) on sex work at the precipice of the historical societal definition of “going nowhere”: our late-20s. Ruth seems to live from moment-to-moment just trying to get by, finding relationships in some unlikely places, trying to make sense out of a world that does not know what to do with a practically parentless grad school student who started stripping on a lark and eventually worked in the dungeons.
I think a writer’s voice either connects with you or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you can at least hope the plot is good or the characters interesting. I didn’t find Ruth especially deep but I enjoyed reading about her navigating the world as I think Brittany Newell is a talented writer, one with confidence who knows her subject well. There’s a static nature to this book and the reader either has to go with it early or it’s not going to work. It did for me because of the author. But if you’re not landing with this ten pages in, bail.