white fur – Simone and Her Books

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Love love love is such a crazy emotion. It’ll make you happy, sad, angry, violent, giggly, stupendous, and scared for your life.

Yet we crave it like a sugar rush and we can’t stop until we have it. Our entire existence revolves around love. Without it, we would be the same people we were yesterday. White Fur proves that love can change any perspective (except maybe for old people).

The plot

32025142 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. The attraction is instant, and what starts out as sexual obsession turns into something greater, stranger, and impossible to ignore.

The unlikely couple moves to Manhattan in hopes of forging an adult life together, but Jamey’s family intervenes in desperation, and the consequences of staying together are suddenly severe. And when a night out with old friends takes a shocking turn, Jamey and Elise find themselves fighting not just for their love but also for their lives.

My thoughts

I had my doubts about this book. This opinion developed mostly from the writing style Jardine Libaire decided to use for this book. Choppy, one or two worded sentences to explain the euphoria of love isn’t really my style of writing. I like things simple and straightforward. This book read like I was watching Requiem for a Dream

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HOWEVER, that isn’t to say that this book was bad. No, in fact, the choppy descriptions with little-to-no context really made the story feel like you were high on love.

Elise and Jamey were two people who weren’t meant to be together. Elise is a young high school drop out living in an apartment with another guy and basically trying to get by every single day. Jamey is this uber-rich Yale undergrad who has his entire life planned out for him the moment he graduates. They weren’t meant to be.

Yet Jamey found something intriguing about the white fur of Elise’s coat and the both of them started going out. At first, it was easy to avoid the emotions. You just have sex, anywhere and any time and then you disperse. No conversation. No getting to know each other over dinner. Just sex.

But then sex turns into other feelings. It’s like they say how you can never have a friend with benefits. It’s never just friends with benefits. Each moment together was creating this whirlwind of emotions that neither anticipated to feel.

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And just like a drug, love changed them. Elise was a wild child lacking a sense of direction and future, but you can see her gruff exterior slowly smooth away to a nurturing person. She adopts a dog, she plays with kids, she finds responsibility and caring that you don’t see when you first meet her.

Jamey is this uptight rich kid who only saw Elise as sex and fun while he was away at college. Slowly, you find that he lets go a little bit and lets his inhibitions free. He’s smoking cigarettes and quitting Yale and taking on a simpler life.

The two characters evolve so much throughout the novel that by the time you realize how much they’ve changed, it’s already over.

I honestly thought this book was going to be another Gossip Girl story or something out of Gilmore Girls, but it wasn’t. It was better than that because it felt more real. Two human beings who were strangers at first find themselves and each other through love. If anything, it’s the most romantic story I’ve ever read.

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I love Book of the Month Club. Most of my hauls from the past few months consisted solely of novels I collect from this subscription service. Reason being is that I don’t have a large budget per month, so I pay a subscription amount for at least one book to be delivered to me every month. But let’s all be serious, I never keep to my budgets.

This month, Book of the Month Club has got some seriously interesting novels and I can’t wait to dive right into them. You’ll probably hear more about these within the next few weeks, so for now I’ll just include the synopses for you to read and ponder.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?

Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated. Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s Upper East Side apartment, Monique listens as Evelyn unfurls her story: from making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the late 80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way. As Evelyn’s life unfolds through the decades—revealing a ruthless ambition, an unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love—Monique begins to feel a very a real connection to the actress. But as Evelyn’s story catches up with the present, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

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. The attraction is instant, and what starts out as sexual obsession turns into something greater, stranger, and impossible to ignore.

Theft by Finding by David Sedaris

David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making.

For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences.

Now, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world. Theft by Finding, the first of two volumes, is the story of how a drug-abusing dropout with a weakness for the International House of Pancakes and a chronic inability to hold down a real job became one of the funniest people on the planet.