A great read. ( )

Cora Carlisle is 36, a wife with twin sons just off to college, when she accepts a 5 week position to chaperone 15 year old Louise Brooks on a trip to NYC from Wichita, KS to study dance in 1922. Cora is a conservative unworldly matron and Louise is a wild child. This is based on a true story.

Cora takes the job to try to find out about her birth parents who left her at an orphanage as a toddler. She then became an orphan train statistic. The 5 weeks are a changing point in Cora’s life and the beginning of Louise’s journey into the film world in its early days. The last third of the book covers the rest of Cora’s life interspersed with brief interactions with Louise.

This book has an interesting connection for me in that Louise Brooks spent the last 30 years of her life in Rochester, NY where I live. Moriarty brought both women to life. Such entirely different personalities but you could easily see how each woman became who she was. Secondary male characters were essential to the plot development but a bit unrealistic at times. Still a good story. ( )

I really enjoyed. A bit of early Wichita history. KIRKUS REVIEWIn Kansas-native Moriarty?s fourth novel (While I?m Falling, 2009, etc.), she imagines the life of the actual Wichita matron who accompanied future silent film star Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 as a favor to Brooks' parents.Although Louise Brooks was a larger-than-life personality whose memoir LuLu in Hollywood is held in high critical esteem, she?s given short shrift by Moriarty, whose interest lies in Cora Carlisle. In 1922, 36-year-old Cora faces an empty nest as her twin sons prepare for college. Her lawyer husband, Alan, 12 years her senior, is a wonderful father and a good man, but their marriage is a sexless sham. She has grudgingly accepted and kept secret his (lifelong) homosexual love affair. So Alan is in no position to stop her when she announces that she is escorting Myra Brooks? 15-year-old daughter to New York City, where the girl has enrolled in dance school. He knows Cora?s real reason for going east. She lived in a Catholic orphanage in Manhattan until she was 7, then was sent to Kansas, where she was raised by a loving farm couple. Now she yearns to learn about her parentage. Louise, precociously sexual as well as beautiful and brainy (Schopenhauer is her favorite author), is a difficult, unlikable charge, but Cora finds time in New York to seek out information. Joseph, the janitor at the orphanage, helps Cora in her research while introducing her to the passion her marriage never offered. With Louise on the road to stardom, Cora returns to Wichita with Joseph, claiming he is her brother¥a charade Alan agrees to maintain. Cora seems to represent the history of women?s rights in the 20th century. An early suffragette, she applauds the end of prohibition and champions birth control and racial equality. She also gives Louise good advice during a rocky period in her career.Unlike the too-infrequently-seen Louise, the fictional characters seem less alive or important than the issues they represent.

Quite a nice read about how a young woman's life takes a turn when she decides to act as a chaperone for a teenaged girl in New York City in the summer of 1922.

Offering glimpses at life for orphan children in NYC to Hollywood starlets and homosexuals in 1920s Kansas it is full of surprises but mostly it's a nice story about nice people.

I read most this one while home sick nursing a head cold and The Chaperone proved a perfect companion. ( )

Wonderful story and great characters! This book started off slow but I'm not sure it was the fault of the book or just me because I'm not a big fan of historical fiction. But fairly early on, I got caught up in the story and then I couldn't put this book down. I really loved the way the author developed Cora (the chaperone) by placing her in a few different and difficult situations so we could understand her growth. This was one of those books that I didn't want to end. I knew nothing about the actress Louise Brooks or the orphan trains so that was something new to research too. Good fiction. ( )