Name: The chaperone
Rating: 3.523809523809524 (21 reviews)
ISBN: 9781594487019

Laura Moriarty

"A novel about the friendship between an adolescent, pre-movie-star Louise Brooks, and the 36-year-old woman who chaperones her to New York City for a summer, in 1922, and how it changes both their lives"--

The chaperone

Melissa Palmer

Book #95 Read in 2013
The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty

The Chaperone is a good work of historical fiction. Cora is asked to be a chaperone to young Louise Brooks, who is going to New York City to dance. Cora wants to go to New York City to revisit the orphanage where she grew up, to see if she can find out any information about her birth mother. While Louise tests limits and tries to act like an adult, Cora investigates her background, befriends a German man named Joseph, and questions why she lives like she does. 

I really enjoyed Moriarty's writing. This book flowed well and the characters were interesting and complex. I recommend it.

http://melissasbookpicks.blogspot.com

Summer Stanley

Enjoyable for the first two parts, but the third was unnecessary. It just went on too long.

Caitlin Berger

I really enjoyed this novel. I didn't exactly know who Louise Brooks was before reading this, but the book was still super well written and interesting. I do think, however, that in the last third of the novel, everything went by very quickly, and I wished the author would've stretched out Cora's summer with Louise a bit more. It was still a delightful read and I truly recommend it to everyone.

Megan Gardner

Erik Wallace

Hanna Tillmanns 

Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton Abbey starring Elizabeth McGovern, The Chaperone is a New York Times-bestselling novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in the 1920s 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.

The Chaperone

Rosie Yakob 

Jacqui Siroia

Accompanying a future famous actress from her Wichita home to New York, chaperone Cora Carlisle shares a life-changing five-week period with her ambitious teenage charge during which she discovers the promise of the 20th century and her own purpose in life. By the author of The Center of Everything. Reprint.

The chaperone

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