White Fur

by Jardine Libaire Narrated by Rebecca Soler

Overview

A stunning star-crossed love story set against the glitz and grit of 1980s New York City
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When Elise Perez meets Jamey Hyde on a desolate winter afternoon, fate implodes, and neither of their lives will ever be the same. Although they are next-door neighbors in New Haven, they come from different worlds. Elise grew up in a housing project without a father and didn't graduate from high school; Jamey is a junior at Yale, heir to a private investment bank fortune and beholden to high family expectations. Nevertheless, the attraction is instant, and what starts out as sexual obsession turns into something greater, stranger, and impossible to ignore.
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The couple moves to Manhattan in search of a new life, and White Fur follows them as they wander through Newport mansions and East Village dives, WASP-establishment yacht clubs and the grimy streets below Canal Street, fighting the forces determined to keep them apart. White Fur combines the electricity of Less Than Zero with the timeless intensity of Romeo and Juliet in this searing, gorgeously written novel that perfectly captures the ferocity of young love.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/08/2017
Set in the late 1980s, Libaire’s novel is an erotic and gritty reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet. When straitlaced Yale student Jamey Hyde meets rough-around-the-edges Elise Perez, the two engage in a hot and heavy relationship that transcends divisions of background and class. At the end of his junior year, Jamey takes a summer internship in New York City and invites Elise to come with him. Despite the numerous social and economic barriers keeping the two apart, their bond intensifies, eventually pushing Jamey to disown his family, sign away his inheritance, and drop out of school before the start of his senior year. With no concrete plans for the future, the two embrace their new life in Manhattan’s East Village, fighting internal and external battles along the way. Major plot points leave the reader skeptical, but the novel benefits from the author’s deft use of language. Writing with all the senses, Libaire demonstrates an ability to evoke vivid moods and places, drawing a stark and realistic depiction of ’80s Manhattan. She also succeeds at giving equal weight and attention to both her protagonists, elegantly toggling between their perspectives. The most lively, memorable, and convincing character in the novel is the setting itself. (May)

From the Publisher

PRAISE FOR WHITE FUR

“A fairy tale of love and class and money and death and New York City in the 1980's, as seen through eyes so new and so young that everything seems like magic all the time…What holds it together is ferocity — Libaire's elegant, incongruous, glitz-and-trash command of the language of youth and young love, and the uncompromising fire of her main characters as they drift and dash from page to page.”—NPR

"Each page crackles with the intensity, fury, lust, and pure insane pleasure of first love. Jardine Libaire has written a chronicle of one couple's wild romance: its highs and lows, its delights and contractions, its beauty and its messiness. A delight to read."—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

"Brilliantly written and deeply felt, this is a love story by turns comic and tragic, but always moving. Whether her characters are on the social register or the welfare roll, Libaire is a keen observer of human nature.”—Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

“Two barely-20-somethings from opposite sides of the tracks fall in frantic love amid the lush grit of New York City in the 1980s…The real strength of the novel is its Technicolor atmosphere: Libaire’s New York is a glittering whirlwind, raw and sweaty and intoxicating. A page-turning whirlwind steeped in pain and hope.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“A love story of equal parts grit and glamour, I loved White Fur for its honest portrait of the extremes of American society, and the love that can bloom anywhere, always, despite the odds. Jardine Libaire is an extraordinary talent.”—Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of The Language of Flowers  

"Writing with all the senses, Libaire demonstrates an ability to evoke vivid moods and places, drawing a stark and realistic depiction of ’80s Manhattan. She also succeeds at giving equal weight and attention to both her protagonists, elegantly toggling between their perspectives. The most lively, memorable, and convincing character in the novel is the setting itself."—Publishers Weekly

“[The] setting is viscerally exposed and uniquely gritty, and Libaire’s meaty, brazen, Ferrari-fast sentences prop it up well.” —Booklist

"White Fur is glorious: dark, dirty, and sexy, lit up with yearning and raw, young love. Libaire's sentences left me breathless. This is a Roman candle of a novel. I absolutely loved it."—Amanda Eyre Ward, author of The Nearness of You and What Was Lost

"This sexy American fairytale about a star-crossed couple solidifies Jardine Libaire’s status as poet laureate of late nights and young love."—Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks Is Dead 

"A sexy, literary love story...White Fur would merely be an excellent exploration of the power dynamic between two lovers if the prose wasn't so evocative and the sex scenes so torrid."—Maris Kreizman, Vulture

Library Journal

★ 05/01/2017
Libaire's (Here Kitty Kitty) second novel is a tale of star-crossed lovers that spans 1986–87. Opening first in New Haven, CT, then moving to New York City, and, finally, ending in Wyoming, the book chronicles the love affair between Jamey Hyde, son of a blue blood financier and an up-from-nothing starlet (acrimoniously divorced), and Elise Perez, a high school dropout and daughter of a single mother from the Bridgeport, CT, projects. They first meet when they are living next door to each other in New Haven; Jamey is a junior at Yale, and Elise is scraping by on her job at a pet store. What starts out as an obsessive affair turns into a ferocious love Jamey is willing to give up everything to pursue. VERDICT Intense and sensual with vivid, muscular writing, the story line gains page-turning momentum as it invokes the highs and lows of the 1980s. Recommended for readers of contemporary American literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/16.]—Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT

Kirkus Reviews

2017-03-07
Two barely-20-somethings from opposite sides of the tracks fall in frantic love amid the lush grit of New York City in the 1980s in Libaire's (Here Kitty Kitty, 2004) new novel.For three months, Elise Perez has been living in a cheerfully dilapidated apartment in New Haven after her roommate (then a stranger) found her sleeping in his car. Next door, Yale junior Jamey Hyde, beautiful, wealthy, from a family of note, is rapidly veering off his proscribed path. She's a high school dropout who ran away from public housing in Bridgeport: half white, half Puerto Rican, "not lost and not found, not incarcerated, not beautiful and not ugly and not ordinary." He is her opposite: born and bred in New York City, son of a starlet and an investment banker (acrimoniously divorced), polished and well-mannered, with a job at his father's namesake firm preordained upon graduation. And against the warnings of everyone around them, they are entranced by each other. Their relationship is obsessive and charged and not entirely pleasant, but their hunger is unstoppable: "She can often tell something's wrong, since after sex he usually hates her and wants her to disappear or die," Libaire writes. "But then he comes back the next night, or the night after, and that's all that matters." Jamey brings Elise with him to New York for the summer—he has an internship at Sotheby's—and then for longer, living together in passionate free fall, severing ties to the lives they knew before. Jamey is willing to sacrifice everything he came from for love—but it's a choice that comes at grave cost. For the most part, Libaire manages to rescue her somewhat familiar characters from the jaws of cliché, but the real strength of the novel is its Technicolor atmosphere: Libaire's New York is a glittering whirlwind, raw and sweaty and intoxicating. A page-turning whirlwind steeped in pain and hope.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171848026
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/30/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

June 1987
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "White Fur"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jardine Libaire.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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