The Chaperone by Laura MoriartyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When this novel begins, it is 1922 and a middle-aged housewife from Kansas, Cora, volunteers to chaperone a 15 year old Louise Brooks across the country to New York City for a month. Louise is head-strong, flirtatious, and quite wild - the complete opposite of Cora and neither of them ever see eye to eye.
Spanning 60 years, although most of the book takes place between 1922 and 1929, we witness huge transformations in society through the eyes of Cora. This was my favourite part of the book, including being transported to a 1922 NYC summer.
We are also passengers to the awakening of Cora and her small town mindset during this short time in NYC, and how over the decades that shapes her life, although this is not obvious to most people around her.
Once I finished the book, I noted in the acknowledgements that Louise Brooks was a real historical figure, and so I did a bit of searching about her also. I like that this small part of history was injected into the book, and it made Louise's tale much sadder, but at the end of the day this is a book about Cora and how that one summer altered the rest of her life.
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