Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy!

Memoir à go-go is an epic poem divided into 116 cantos. The epic, described in the blurb as a “feminist fairy tale,” centers a woman who go-go dances topless at a dive bar in New York City during the 90s. Her passion is photography, but she cannot afford to sustain her art without her job of dancing for men. The narrative follows her as she meets a friend and a few men at her work and meditates on her job and the political climate of the city towards sex work.

I like this idea a lot. A lot about this one worked for me, and there wasn’t much that didn’t. I liked the voice a lot, the discussion of what constitutes art and fine art was interesting to me as well as the commentary about surviving as a solo woman in NYC. I think that what held me back was simply that the style was just not entirely to my personal taste—I am someone who enjoys memorizing lines that I like, but there weren’t any particular arrangements of words from this book that stuck in my mind. But I really found that Ludewig developed a compelling voice. The narrator engages in a lot of wordplay and whimsicality, and does ultimately feel quite real to me. She is young, strange, empathetic, and invigorating. I was invested in her narrative and grew to enjoy the strangeness of her form.