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The Chaperone

A Novel

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

Inspired by the real-life relationship between the fifteen-year-old future movie star Louise Brooks and the thirty-six-year-old woman who chaperoned her to New York City for a summer, The Chaperone is the story of an unlikely friendship between two women who couldn't be more different and the way it changes both their lives.

In the summer of 1922, only a few years before she became a famous actress of the silent screen and an icon for her generation, fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks left Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she was accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who was neither mother nor friend. Little is known about this real chaperone, but Laura Moriarty's novel imagines her as Cora Carlisle, a complicated but very traditional woman with her own reason for making the trip. Of course, Cora has no idea what she's in for: young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her black bob with bangs, was known for her arrogance, her lack of respect for convention, and her keen intelligence. Cora is hardly a stranger to adversity, but by the time their train pulls into Grand Central Station, she fears that supervising and protecting her cunning young charge will be at best exhausting and, at worst, impossible. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change one, if not both, of their lives forever.

For Cora, New York holds the promise of discovery that might provide solace to a lifetime of yearning, and so even as she does her best to endure and watch over Louise in a strange and bustling city, she secretly perseveres on her own mission. She does indeed make a great discovery, and though it isn't the one she anticipates, it liberates her in a way she could not have imagined. The United States has been steadily moving out of the Victorian era and into the modern world, but the pace has been so much quicker in New York. Over the course of the summer, Cora's eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century, and she returns to Kansas with a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 2, 2012
      Moriarty (While I’m Falling) skims the surface of 1920s life in Wichita, Kans., where homosexuality, contraception, and being just about anything other than white and Protestant is considered a moral offence. In the summer of 1922, prim, married Cora Carlisle chaperones a young Louise Brooks, the silent film star, to New York. Cora keeps mum about her own childhood journey from the New York Home for Friendless Girls to a new life with an adopted family in Kansas, because she intends to search for her birth mother once she and Louise arrive. What follows the trip for Louise is history: film stardom until the advent of sound. What follows for Cora is at first a letdown for the reader, and then highly dubious, given her naïve and conservative nature. Though what happens in New York gives Cora a new moral order, for the rest of her life she keeps it, too, a secret. The novel, which in its final stretch races to 1982, attempts to portray Cora as a heroine buffeted by the bigotry and priggishness of the Jazz Age, but glosses over events and neglects the inner lives of many of its characters. Agent: Tracy Fisher, WME Entertainment.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In 1922 a teenager from Kansas named Louise Brooks needed a chaperone so she could attend a summer dance school in New York. For private reasons, Cora Carlisle, a wife and mother of grown children, volunteered to watch over the willful girl. Actress Elizabeth McGovern's soft-spoken performance is utterly entrancing. Her careful use of emotion and mastery of expression pull listeners into this period piece about a young woman on the road to self-discovery and a girl on the brink of fame. McGovern's skills at creating distinctive characterizations, including a number of accents, make THE CHAPERONE an outstanding audio experience. Listeners will be fascinated by the historical details of life in New York, the plight of women, and the social customs of the Roaring Twenties. C.B.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

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