6/22/2023 0 Comments The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty![]() ![]() The novel, which in its final stretch races to 1982, attempts to portray Cora as a heroine buffeted by the bigotry and priggishness of the Jazz Age, but glosses over events and neglects the inner lives of many of its characters. ![]() Though what happens in New York gives Cora a new moral order, for the rest of her life she keeps it, too, a secret. The Chaperone opens with Cora Carlisle waiting out a rainstorm in a car with a friend when she hears about Louise Brooks for the first time. What follows for Cora is at first a letdown for the reader, and then highly dubious, given her naïve and conservative nature. What follows the trip for Louise is history: film stardom until the advent of sound. ![]() Cora keeps mum about her own childhood journey from the New York Home for Friendless Girls to a new life with an adopted family in Kansas, because she intends to search for her birth mother once she and Louise arrive. Available at: Barnes & Noble Apple Books IndieBound. In the summer of 1922, prim, married Cora Carlisle chaperones a young Louise Brooks, the silent film star, to New York. ![]() Moriarty (While I’m Falling) skims the surface of 1920s life in Wichita, Kans., where homosexuality, contraception, and being just about anything other than white and Protestant is considered a moral offence. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |