In 1922, Cora Carlisle, a conventional Kansas housewife, agrees to chaperone fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks on a summer trip to New York City. While Louise pursues stardom at a modern dance school, Cora follows a private agenda to uncover the secrets of her own origins at the orphanage where she was born. Their journey exposes the friction between Cora’s guarded Victorian upbringing and Louise’s reckless, modern sensibilities. The narrative follows Cora’s evolution as she confronts her past, discovers her birth parents, and adapts to the rapid social shifts of the Jazz Age.
Readers of historical realism and twentieth-century social history will find a detailed portrait of the transition from traditional values to modern individualism. The story appeals to those interested in the real-life biography of silent film star Louise Brooks and the restrictive laws surrounding adoption and womanhood in the early 1900s. Readers finish the book with a clear understanding of how the prohibition era and the flapper movement fundamentally altered the domestic lives and expectations of American women across different generations.
Balanced in tone; an easy read.
Best for readers like The Story Seeker. Which reader are you?
Insights from The Chaperone
“She wasn't her mother. She was just the woman who had birthed her.”
Cora finds her biological mother only to realize she is a complete stranger. It makes you see how blood matters less than the person who actually raised you.
“Louise was a girl who did not know how to be quiet.”
Louise Brooks is a wild teenager heading to New York to be a star. Her defiance shows how much energy it took for women to just be themselves back then.
Cora spent her life being the perfect, proper wife in Wichita. One trip to New York broke every rule she thought was set in stone.
“It was a job, being beautiful.”
The way Louise treats her beauty like a chore or a weapon is fascinating. It shows how being pretty can be its own kind of cage.
- Published
- 2012
- Publisher
- Riverhead
- ISBN
- 9781101585658
- Language
- EN
