Sparks fly when Laura Moriarty re-creates the socially uptight world of 1920s Kansas and teams Cora Carlisle, a straitlaced mother and wife of a successful Wichita lawyer, with Louise Brooks, the 15-year-old helmet-haired beauty who became the queen of silent films. With a comfortable mash-up of fact and fiction, The Chaperone explores themes of disconnected parents and children familiar to readers of Moriarty's previous novels (including While I'm Falling).
Cora is hired to accompany Louise as a chaperone in New York City--but hired more to convince Brooks's father to pay for the young dancer's trip than to rein in his irrepressible daughter's hedonistic impulses. As the unlikely couple rides the luxurious train from the Kansas prairie to Grand Central Terminal, Moriarty shifts her story's focus from the uninhibited Brooks to Cora, whose corseted Wichita propriety masks a latent passion that will bloom in the anonymity of New York. (Her marriage is one in name only, after she discovered her husband's homosexuality.) Although Cora and Brooks begin their trip a generation apart, Cora learns that "spending time with the young... can exasperate, of course, and frighten," but it "can also drag you... right up to the window of the future, and even push you through." For Cora, Louise Brooks's departure from Wichita to live among the cultural avant-garde becomes a kind of permission "to at least try to live as one wished, or as close to it as possible." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.