The Chaperone

The Chaperone was incredibly engaging, one of three novels I raced through while sunning myself last week at the beach. As you’d expect from the title, the story focuses on Cora Carlisle, a somewhat prudish Kansas housewife, who volunteers to chaperone 15-year-old Louise Brooks one 1920s summer in New York City. Laura Moriarty deftly chronicles their exploits in the Big Apple, where a strong-willed and somewhat loose-moraled Louise has come to study at a prestigious dance academy. Louise, with her jet-black bob, ends up becoming one of the decade’s most famous silent film stars (really!), but Moriarty ensures that we never lose sight of the fact that Cora is the book’s true star.

I found Cora’s backstory about her search for her birth mother and how she arrived in Kansas (via an orphan train, which was a common way to place orphans from cities like Boston and New York with foster families in the Midwest and West between 1853-1929) to be quite interesting. I also appreciated Moriarty’s ability to make her characters multi-dimensional, especially Cora, who struggles to embrace the changing times — women’s rights and the end of prohibition — while remaining true to her conservative Christian values.

Even though the book starts out a bit slow, once the story begins to unfold you won’t want to put it down. A delightfully entertaining read.