The New York Times bestseller and the USA
Today #1 Hot Fiction Pick for the summer, The
Chaperone is a captivating novel about the woman who
chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 and
the summer that would change them both.
Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and
an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves
Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of
Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a
thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend.
Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own
reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she's in for. Young
Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black
bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of
respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend
together will transform their lives forever.
For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might
answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does
her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place
she embarks on a mission of her own. And while what she finds isn't
what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have
imagined. Over the course of Cora's relationship with Louise, her
eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new
understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.
Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s,'30s, and beyond-from
the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of
the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights
and new opportunities for women-Laura Moriarty's The
Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion
and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and
what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora
Carlisle, and others like them.
