One of our Great Reads You May Have Missed in 2012.
I am reminded of the 20s musical number "Anything Goes" here, for in "The Chaperone" it certainly does. This is 20s New York, the girl being chaperoned is the young Louise Brooks (the silent filmstar) and the whole prohibition and explosive atmosphere of the period is superbly realised.
Our heroine is orphaned Cora, the chaperone, a lovely character in a dead-end marriage, bent on finding her biological family. What she discovers both in her marriage and her old adoption home are secrets that eventually all concerned will take to their graves. Highly recommended.
On a summer's day in 1922 Cora Carlisle boards a train from Wichita, Kansas, to New York City, leaving behind a marriage that's not as perfect as it seems and a past that she buried long ago. She is charged with the care of a stunning young girl with a jet-black fringe and eyes wild and wise beyond her fifteen years. This girl is hungry for stardom and Cora for something she doesn't yet know. Cora will be many things in her lifetime - an orphan, a mother, a wife, a mistress - but in New York she is a chaperone and her life is about to change. It is here under the bright lights of Broadway, in a time when prohibition reigns and speakeasies with their forbidden whispers behind closed doors thrive, that Cora finds what she has been searching for. It is here, in a time when illicit thrills and daring glamour sizzle beneath the laws of propriety that her life truly begins. It is here that Cora and her charge, Louise Brooks, take their first steps towards their dreams.
Laura Moriarty earned a degree in social work before returning for her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. She was the recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. She lives with her daughter in Lawrence, Kansas.
