
Purchase
Riverhead
June 2012
On Sale: June 5, 2012
384 pages ISBN: 1594487014 EAN: 9781594487019 Kindle: B0072NWKQK Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
USA Today's #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.
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