The Chaperone
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4.4 • 22 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Soon to be a feature film from the creators of Downton Abbey
On a summer's day in 1922, Cora Carlisle boards a train from Wichita, Kansas, to New York City, charged with the care of a stunningly beautiful young girl with a jet-black bob and wisdom way beyond her fifteen years.
The girl is Louise Brooks and, for her, New York offers a chance of stardom beneath the bright lights of Broadway. For Cora, whose formative years were spent at The New York Home for Friendless Girls, the trip offers the opportunity to discover the truth about her past. It will also, although she doesn't realize it yet, offer her the chance for a very different future.
Set in a time of illicit thrills and daring glamour, a time when prohibition reigns and speakeasies thrive behind closed doors, The Chaperone tells Cora's story as she finally discovers who she is and - more importantly - who she wants to be.
'What a beautiful book. I loved every page' Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife
'This is that rare, precious and fabulous thing - a proper story, with characters you care about desperately and root for right to the end . . . I can't recommend this novel highly enough' Daily Mail
'A lovely novel, full of humanity' Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 na ve 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.
