Could not connect with this book at all, did not finish reading

NYC in the 80s - what more could I want in a book? How about a dark and twisty romance? Well, White Fur had it all and I absolutely LOVED reading every single word. Talk about fiction at its best!

Intense, emotional, gritty, and raw - White Fur is an engrossing story that you won't be able to put down. Its chock full of the good and bad times that Elise and Jamey experience on their roller coaster ride of a love story. He's rich, she's not. He's expected to act and behave in a certain way. She's loud and open about her past and who she is. Their attraction is white hot. Combustible is the word to describe their relationship. Told from dual perspectives (which I LOVE), we get the find out what Elise and Jamey are both thinking about each other, themselves, and their future. An intoxicating read that tugs and tears at your heartstrings. These characters are not the ones you root for, but then again why can't they be? Flawed and broken, Elise and Jamey make for quite a romance story. A story that I won't soon forget.

I LOVED White Fur and can't wait to read more by Libaire. I would happily recommend this book to fans of Libaire and anyone looking for their next great read - you won't be disappointed!!

The premise of White Fur is good. There was a lot of potential in this book but there wasn't a connection as the reader (myself) with the characters. The tone of voice didn't fit the story the author was trying to tell and I just didn't like the book.

finished with this book and I'm just stunned by the beautiful prose. It's very strange though. I should have known by the epigraph (ROMEO!) it would be about obsessive love. I'm almost scared to finish. It's one of those novels I have to wait until dark to read. Daylight just doesn't feel appropriate.

This is probably one of those books that will stay with me for a long time. Jamey and Elise are so unique, so real, and so well fleshed out as characters that you can't help but wonder what they're up to now. Despite how deep they were, the events of this book are so odd and random and not what you expect that it kind of all seems like a dream. The stream of consciousness writing style adds to this acid trip feeling.

As far as the ending...I don't know. I kept waiting to see how they would arrive at the ending that was foreshadowed in the beginning, and I did not expect what I read. The final ending seems just as odd as all the other turns of events, so I suppose it's fitting. In true dog lover fashion...I kept wondering about Buck.

Definitely, recommend for a strange ride!

I read some reviews for White Fur last year and after reading the blurb, it sounded like a book I would enjoy. Books like The Notebook and movies like “Pretty in Pink” are faves, and this story is about a rich boy who falls for a low class girl and they do fall in love, but it certainly isn’t that simple and not really what I expected.

*May contain mild spoilers*

Jamie is a Yale boy who comes from a wealthy family. They have high expectations of him and there’s no question about the direction of his future, until Jamey meets his neighbor Elise, and discovers he’s both fascinated by her and repulsed at the same time. He develops a hot and heavy sexual relationship with her, but fears intimacy. Elise is like a polar opposite. She’s low class, comes from a multi-racial background, never graduated high school, doesn’t know her dad, and learned about sex, violence, and drugs at a young age. She wonders about Jamey and why he’s distant from her outside of their sexual encounters. She wants a normal relationship with him and wants him to see her–the real her. She wants him to be interested in her. The truth is, Jamey knows he shouldn’t want Elise. She smokes, curses, and he has issues with her behavior. Not only that, he’s reminded by his best friend and family repeatedly that this simply can’t happen, but he can’t seem to shake the feelings he has for her.

Time moves forward and Jamey invites Elise to live with him in New York where there are less distractions. The hope is that they can continue their relationship without drama, but unfortunately, Jamey’s gang of a family won’t leave it alone.

The story is gritty and definitely cringeworthy. I felt that the writing was beautiful and detailed, but for me, it was way too wordy for this type of story. I found the multiple breaks in the narrative confusing and didn’t like the characters. Jamey and Elise’s relationship is pretty much all sex with zero romance for the majority of the book and I can’t understand how this book is described as a modern ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ To me, in a Romeo and Juliet like story, couples don’t have sex with other people, nor do people in love for that matter, but that’s just my personal opinion. I didn’t have any emotion until the last 30-40 pages or so as things started to pick up, and it was more or less over the dog. There just wasn't enough going on to keep my interest. It had an unexpected ending, but not one that I was really pleased with because I felt like the future was still so uncertain for them. I’m wondering if there might be another book?

This is obviously just not my favorite kind of book, but I know others will like it. Don’t skip the book because of my review if this sounds like one you’d enjoy!

3***

I'd like to thank Netgalley, the author, and publisher for this ARC in exchange for a review.

Everyone, really, is just looking for love.. This story is about two young people from different sides of the track who fall into a deep, intense relationship full of lust and grit and tragedy. It's dark, it's dirty, it's raw, and comical in some parts.
This all takes place in the 1980's, in New York.
I really felt for the young man Jamey who is due to inherit much from his wealthy family. He has never been happy in his life until he meets Elise who had left her dirt poor home to come to New York to try and find a better life, and ends up loving Jayme "too much".

This would have been a 2-star review if not for the last 50 pages of the novel. The first 250 pages tell the story of a dysfunctional girl from a poor, screwed-up family who decides to make her rich, preppy neighbor boy fall in love with her. You follow their relationship for most of the book, which is mostly just the two of them secretly wondering if they actually love each other or if they're just trying to stick it to their respective families by dating someone from a completely different world. The last 50 pages feel like they belong in a completely different story. One where stuff actually happens. I'm not going to say what happens at the end because, honestly, you could probably read just the last 50 pages and still get the whole story.

This book did not grab me at all and I just was not keyed in from the beginning. Most of the books I review from Net Galley I really like. I could not finish this book, and that is a rare for me.

Haunting, unputdownable, original and refreshing. I had a love-hate relationship with our protagonist but I never wanted to leave her side; her story and cross-socioeconomic romance had me rapt.

There's something about that age, around 19 or 20, just barely into adulthood, where it feels like if you aren't in some sort of constant crisis and don't have drama and intensity, that it's not really love. In Jardine Libaire's White Fur, Elise Perez and Jamey Hyde have being in that age bracket in common but precious little else. Jamey is the scion of a prominent Northeastern banking family, in his junior year at Yale and drifting aimlessly towards his already-planned-for-him future working with his father when Elise moves in next door. A textbook example of "rough around the edges", she's escaped from the housing project where her single mother raised her and her half siblings and is constantly wearing the white fur jacket she traded for on the Greyhound. They couldn't be more different, but they're drawn to each other and quickly find themselves in a relationship that changes their lives forever.

After they've been together a few months in New Haven, Jamey's summer internship at Sotheby's pulls them into New York City and closer to Jamey's family orbit, which proves problematic. The Hydes are furious with him for dating so far below their expectations and try to engineer a breakup by cutting off Jamey's funding, but the couple soldiers on. After an old friend resurfaces and disaster strikes, though, a final showdown between Elise and her beloved's family for his heart and soul is inevitable.

This is the kind of novel that gets described as "gritty" and "raw", which actually means there's just a lot of non-prettified sex in it. That's the basis of Elise and Jamey's relationship, both when it's just starting out and after they've fallen in love: sex and lots of it. I'm not prudish about that kind of thing, but there's a point at which it starts to feel gratuitous and this book went soaring past it. The ease of just banging a lot without worrying about STDs, and having venues for some kinkier hijinks, is one of the few ways in which I felt like this book really took advantage of its 80s New York City setting, which was underplayed to the extent where I forgot it was supposed to be taking place in the 80s for large portions of its duration. Which isn't necessarily problematic in and of itself (I don't need a pop culture reference every three pages), but it makes you wonder why not just set it in the present day, or even the 90s if you're trying to avoid the way social media would play into it. 80s NYC seems like a setting that could have really been played into in a way that Libaire just didn't.

I found Elise and Jamey (particularly the former) to be relatively well-drawn characters, and the narrative did make me root for them as a couple. The way Jamey is manipulated by virtually everyone in his life made it understandable that he'd fall so hard for Elise because she actually sees him as a person, and I enjoyed the way that Libaire made it clear that her interest in him has no root at all in his wealth the way that everyone assumes. But even here there are some issues...Jamey is kind of blank, and Elise's Latina heritage (she's half, from her father) never has any real impact, so why not either just write her as white or write her as actually Latina and play with race issues as well as class issues? And then there's the ending, which I just found too easy. Libaire has a gift for prose, and I'll be keeping an eye out for her future work, but this didn't quite come together for me. If you like "gritty" stories or a good twist on a star-crossed lovers tale, you'll find something to enjoy here, otherwise maybe not.

I tried to get into this book, but ultimately it wasn't the right fit. I have a few friends that might enjoy it, though!

I didn't personally connect with this book, but the writing is stellar and I look forward to seeing future work from Jardine Libaire.

What I enjoyed about this book was how it wasn't the cookie cutter story that seems to be on the shelves these days. The contrast between the social and cultural classes is spot on and you feel for each of the characters. You find yourself cheering the couple on and hoping that they make it work despite the obstacles.

Unfortunately I wasn't a fan. The writing is good, but the characters are so completely unlikable.

I read about 64 page and I couldn't do it anymore. The story of Elise and Jamey wasn't one that I wanted to invest in anymore. It seemed to be going down a very destructive path that I just couldn't see myself enjoying.
I had to add a star but I didn't finish this novel. Thank you for the opportunity. I know that it has a lot of great/positive buzz. I might not have been the right audience.

I couldn't get interested in these characters or their story. I know this book got a lot of advance hype but I didn't get it.

This book seemed to have it all - star-crossed lovers, Yale trust-fund babies, a young girl on her own, and it's all set against a wild background of 1980s NYC. However, the Romeo and Juliet story in the Reagan-era setting just didn't live up to the expectations that I had for this novel. White Fur is one of those stories in which I have a love/hate relationship. The talented writing and great premise for the ups and downs of the relationship between trust-fund Jamey and girl from the projects Elise kept me going to the finish, but I was left thinking I was missing something. Was I? Read this book and share your thoughts!

I wasn't sure what to make of this book when I first started reading it. Thought it might be one of those weird, existential books that made no sense. But I ended up being surprised by this. I found myself rooting for Jamey and Elise. I liked the descriptions of NYC in the 1980's and the contrast of the grittiness and privileged lifestyles at the time. The story was well written and capitalizing to the end. Thanks to netgalley.com for the ARC.

It was difficult to like this book because I had a hard time connecting or even liking the characters. Elise and Jamey were next to dull and I think their position was made worse by a writing style I didn't care for. It felt overburdened with details, every movement or embellishment explained in detail, not to mention the telling feel of the story. While I got a lot of details, it felt like these were being thrown at me in a lecture rather than discovering them in a good book.

The way the narrative was split up also made it difficult for me to sink into the story. A single chapter would have dozens of cuts between action, like in a movie where the camera bounces back and forth between two or more people too fast to keep track. There wasn't time to enjoy anything; this style highlighted what I already didn't like and saved nothing.

Why did I keep reading this? I'm not sure, but I think I was hoping it would get better, that someone would do something or a new character would make an appearance that would give me a reason to care, to look behind the butchered mini-chapters.

As you can tell because this was a DNF, there came a point when it wasn't worth it anymore. I don't think White Fur has anything to offer in the way of entertainment or a thoughtful reading experience, so at 29% I finally gave it up as a bad job and moved on.