Book Review
So happy to have read Laura Moriarty’s “The Chaperone.” This story begins in 1922 as Cora Kaufmann, a Wichita, Kansas thirty-six year old joins Louise Brooks, a teen protege, on a trip to New York city to attend a summer dance workshop. This teen will become Louise Brooks, the silent film star of her time in a story line that continues well into the 1980s.
In reading it quickly became evident that this fictionalized account of Louise Brook’s ascent to stardom is as much the story of the chaperone opening herself up to freedoms in her own life as it is about the younger woman defying tradition.
In a separate story line we learn Cora is prompted to travel with Louise because she is searching for answers to her own early years. She wants to visit the Catholic orphanage from whence she came. Thus her personal journey of discovery and Louise’s rather rebellious dance with liberation and decorum clash with the changing cultural virtues of the times. I was totally invested in the characters long before reaching the midway point in the book. Why did Cora’s husband agree to allow her to travel with this teen; and was Louise’s talent the primary reason her mother permitted her to travel to NY.
Moriarty does a fine job contextualizing the turn of the century in a way that helped me identify with this period of change in the country’s history. It also helped me think about what is constant whenever one faces change in their own life.
I was compensated for this review by Blogher but the opinions contained herein are my own.
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