Laura Moriarty (2)Besprekingen

This book was okay. It was mostly about a mother reflecting on her own past and her relationship with her own mother in the midsts of a tragedy caused by her daughter. It’s interesting to see how the main character’s own past and upbringing caused her to have such a strained relationship with her own daughter. I liked how not everything was neatly tied up at the end, but overall it wasn’t a book that constantly held my attention.

I really enjoyed. A bit of early Wichita history. KIRKUS REVIEWIn Kansas-native Moriarty?s fourth novel (While I?m Falling, 2009, etc.), she imagines the life of the actual Wichita matron who accompanied future silent film star Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 as a favor to Brooks' parents.Although Louise Brooks was a larger-than-life personality whose memoir LuLu in Hollywood is held in high critical esteem, she?s given short shrift by Moriarty, whose interest lies in Cora Carlisle. In 1922, 36-year-old Cora faces an empty nest as her twin sons prepare for college. Her lawyer husband, Alan, 12 years her senior, is a wonderful father and a good man, but their marriage is a sexless sham. She has grudgingly accepted and kept secret his (lifelong) homosexual love affair. So Alan is in no position to stop her when she announces that she is escorting Myra Brooks? 15-year-old daughter to New York City, where the girl has enrolled in dance school. He knows Cora?s real reason for going east. She lived in a Catholic orphanage in Manhattan until she was 7, then was sent to Kansas, where she was raised by a loving farm couple. Now she yearns to learn about her parentage. Louise, precociously sexual as well as beautiful and brainy (Schopenhauer is her favorite author), is a difficult, unlikable charge, but Cora finds time in New York to seek out information. Joseph, the janitor at the orphanage, helps Cora in her research while introducing her to the passion her marriage never offered. With Louise on the road to stardom, Cora returns to Wichita with Joseph, claiming he is her brother�a charade Alan agrees to maintain. Cora seems to represent the history of women?s rights in the 20th century. An early suffragette, she applauds the end of prohibition and champions birth control and racial equality. She also gives Louise good advice during a rocky period in her career.Unlike the too-infrequently-seen Louise, the fictional characters seem less alive or important than the issues they represent.

We follow Evelyn from grade 4 thru high school as she learns some tough lessons about life and fulfillment of our dreams. Author?s first book.

Quite a nice read about how a young woman's life takes a turn when she decides to act as a chaperone for a teenaged girl in New York City in the summer of 1922.

Offering glimpses at life for orphan children in NYC to Hollywood starlets and homosexuals in 1920s Kansas it is full of surprises but mostly it's a nice story about nice people.

I read most this one while home sick nursing a head cold and The Chaperone proved a perfect companion.

Not much plot but great characters. The book is set in the early to mid eighties and the narrator is a poor, nerdy, smart girl in small town Kansas. I was the same age as the narrator at that time and I think the author did a great job of bringing that era to life again for me. The book is a quick read -- I finished it in about 2 days.

Wonderful story and great characters! This book started off slow but I'm not sure it was the fault of the book or just me because I'm not a big fan of historical fiction. But fairly early on, I got caught up in the story and then I couldn't put this book down. I really loved the way the author developed Cora (the chaperone) by placing her in a few different and difficult situations so we could understand her growth. This was one of those books that I didn't want to end. I knew nothing about the actress Louise Brooks or the orphan trains so that was something new to research too. Good fiction.

I love old Hollywood and even though I've heard about Louise Brooks and have seen pictures of her didn't know much about her. Cora (Louise's Chaperone) and Louise traveled from Kansas to New York, hopefully to start her career in dance. Louise is pretty mature for a 15 year old; in fact I thought she was much older and Cora was much older than her 35 years but I guess it was the era of the book – 1920's I think. She had an ulterior motive to go to NY and her husband was aware of it too so no secrets there.

At first, I didn't find this book very good and almost decided to stop halfway through but kept going all the same just to see what happened. I'm glad I did because the last 200 pages were well-done and worth reading after all.

recommended by AP English listserv

as excellent as promised

En 1922, la arrebatadora y precoz Louise Brooks, de tan solo quince años, y su acompañante, Cora Carlisle, una mujer casada muy tradicional, viajan juntas desde Witchita, Kansas, a Nueva York, la nueva metrópolis de moda. Cada una tiene sus propios motivos para hacer ese viaje: la rebelde Louise se ha inscrito en la academia de danza vanguardista Denishawn, porque sueña con llegar a ser una famosa bailarina. Una ilusión que cumplirá de largo, convirtiéndose en una conocida actriz del cine mudo y en la mujer más deseada de Hollywood de la época. Por su parte, Cora no sólo busca escapar de la monotonía de su vida, sino que quiere cumplir un deseo que lleva años postergando: encontrar sus orígenes, ya que nunca ha conocido a sus padres. Obligadas a pasar juntas un verano en la fascinante y caleidoscópica ciudad de Nueva York, estas dos mujeres aprenderán a entenderse y descubrirán que la vida les tiene reservadas muchas sorpresas.

I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I still haven't read the blurb so I had no idea what to expect.

The author's voice and writing style made it easy for me to get into the book right away and the Cora's story held me until the very last sentence.

I don't read a lot of "chick lit" but every once in a while, a good character-driven story, free from murder and mayhem, is nice.

Fictionalized account of the woman who accompanied fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks (the future silent film star) to New York in 1922. Thirty-six-year-old protagonist Cora Carlisle desires to find out more about her birth parents, after coming to Kansas on an orphan train. The plot follows their trip to New York and the subsequent events in their lives. It is based on a true story.

I liked Cora's backstory - it was nice to see an orphan treated well by her adopting family. The author inserts social issues of the time, such as Prohibition and women's suffrage, which add to the historic flavor. The primary drawback is similar to many other historical fiction books I have read. The attitudes of the people are portrayed as more contemporary than the era warrants. Cora's actions, especially pertaining to a man she meets in New York, seem out of character. I liked the idea of the book more than its execution. I understand this book was made into a movie by Masterpiece Films.

Read by my reading group and enjoyed by group. We liked it enough to choose other titles by this author.
FROM AMAZON: The Chaperone is a captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the summer that would change them both.

Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a 15-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip. She has no idea what she’s in for: Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous blunt bangs and black bob, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever.

For Cora, New York holds the promise of discovery that might prove an answer to the question at the center of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in a strange and bustling city, she embarks on her own mission. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, it liberates her in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of the summer, Cora’s eyes are opened to the promise of the 20th century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.

Book club book by Beth

A well-written coming of age story.

This book was a random selection on my part, but turned out to be one of the best reads I've had this year. I had never heard of Louise Brooks who is the 15 yr old girl being chaperoned by Cora, the main character, and was surprised to discover she was a real person who became a star in the silent movie era. The book covers Cora's life from infancy to death in extreme old age. And what a life it was, stretching from the age of horse & buggy to a world where travel by plane is commonplace. The months she chaperones Louise in NY are key to the rest of her life back in Wichita, thus we see the enormous changes in American cities and society. Fascinating in so many ways.
The author has a pleasant writing style, and it is 'easy' to read. I thoroughly recommend it.
I have not yet seen the movie made from the book, but have heard mixed reviews.

This is a middling book charting a woman's journey from the childhood she spent during the early years of the century in an orphanage in New York to life in Kansas with adopted parents, up to her death as an old family matron in the 1980s.

Cora's very traditional upbringing in Kansas has not prepared her for the journey she took in the 1920s as a chaperone to the 15-year-old Louise Brooks (a real character) while she started out her dancing career with the Denishawn Dance Company in New York. It is amusing to watch her develop from her uptight, corset-wearing, and very conservative into a modern woman with views ahead of her time. I chuckled at the lecture she gave her young charge about women being like candy, and men not wanting to have candy that has been unwrapped. I have heard this same disgusting analogy from some Egyptian TV personality (possibly a preacher). Consider that the character of Louise Brooks rightly sneered and laughed at this, as many of the liberated flappers of that time did, some 100 years ago, while women in this day and age are still held hostage to that type of reasoning.

The book is a bit drawn out. Some reviewers have pointed out that it had perhaps set out to tackle too many issues in one volume: Birth control, pregnancy out of wedlock, adoption and identity, gay rights, and women's liberation. That in addition to the huge historical scope of two world wars, depression era and orphan trains makes this book a bit too unwieldy for full enjoyment.

Cora starts out as a pathetic conservative character completely dependent on her distant husband, she makes a miraculous, somewhat unreasonable, recovery into a pioneer of 20th century issue. The idea is uplifting if it was not far-fetched.

The moral of the story as I understood it is that living a long and fulfilled life starts with adapting to your circumstances and making the most of them, while opening up to changes in moral standards, styles and attitudes.

I read it because I, as a librarian and a writer, was troubled by the noisy and hostile reaction to it. I still am, and the number of "reviewers" here who have slapped 1 or 5 star ratings on it while proudly proclaiming that they have not read it and don't intend to appall me.

So yes, I read it. And will confine my observations to the conclusion that its main weaknesses are writerly and not political/social. A political/social statement, even with good intentions, doesn't make for good writing. Hard as Moriarty tries to inject complexity into characters (the rhinestone cowgirl in an obscenely expensive sports care plastered with anti-Muslim hate stickers who also makes quilts out of dead people's clothes as mementoes for grieving families, for one), they feel contrived and forced, to Make A Point. Other reviewers have trashed her "world-building" as lacking in detail or consistency; I will defend it to the extent that it does suggest the insidiousness of where our xenophobia could be leading us. Some reviewers admired and connected with Sarah-Mary, while others have called her a "horrible, horrible person." I found her reasonably acceptable as a product of her environment.

BUT... for all the good intentions in the world, the utter passivity of Sadaf, an adult, highly-educated woman, placing her life entirely in the hands of a random teenager just passes my ability to suspend disbelief. She weeps, she suffers, she shuts up and does whatever Sarah-Mary tells her. I kept waiting for her to come to life, to take some control, and she never does. There are clumsy, endless info-dump conversations solely for the purpose of explaining Islam to the uninformed. I understand that Moriarty did seek the input of several Muslims on her manuscript, so perhaps the content of those conversations was technically accurate, but Sadaf still seems to serve as a cardboard-cut-out Muslim and not a fully-realized, believable person of her faith and culture. Moriarty tries too hard to fit it all in there: black people, check; Jews, check; gays, check (she even gets two-fer on that one); rednecks with guns, check.

And the plot... sigh. The never-ending breathless sequence of perils from which our plucky heroine always manages to escape seems to be a required trope of YA fiction, and quickly gets tiresome. And [spoiler, and I don't even care] the great last-second, miraculous moonlight rescue by the best friend from hundreds of miles away? Please.

Are readers justified in hating on this book? Sure, if that's how they feel - AND if they've read it. Do I think Moriarty should not have written thisbook? Absolutely not - she (and any other writer) can and should write anything she wants, and people can read it or not as they choose. I just wish she'd written a better one.

I wasn't fully engaged until finding that both the main character, Cora, and where she lives, Wichita, Kansas, will soon be contrasted with Cora chaperoning the young, charismatic Louise Brooks as she goes to study dance in New York City. I was at first focused on Louise, and shared Cora's concerns about her. But despite Louise's flash, Cora is indeed the more complex and interesting character. AT no point ws I really able to predict what was to happen.
This was another great book to listen to. Elizabeth McGovern, who narrates, displayed talents I didn't know she had.

I am surprised at how much I enjoyed this book, although I do agree with some of the negative reviews. Yes, the main characters do not seem believable. Also, the historical facts left me with a sense that the main character was a female version of Forest Gump, with historical titbits showing up here and there. Yet, yet…

I was drawn in by the idea that between peoples’ public facades and their private lives may be an abyss. I think of myself as a milder version of the fictionalized Louise Brown, in the sense that my thoughts and believes are very much exposed, and that often I have paid the price for being vocal or outward about subjects that were “unpopular”. But I have seen and admired people that are able to walk on that very fine line where their dignity and integrity were not damaged, yet they did not expose themselves to others scrutiny, or caused a stir with their views or attitudes. Oh, yes, we do need the Louise Browns of the world to move things along. But I admire those that live their lives in quiet rectitude.

My rating is 3.5 really.

Overall liked the story, some of the bigger picture,historical context stuff was a little clunky. Grew to like Cora as the book progressed,but she was pretty stodgy in the New York section. I found Louise to be totally unlikable throughout

Louse Brooks is the real part of this historical fiction. Cora Carlisle as her chaperone in NYC is not. But it makes for a great story. Headed to the city for the summer so Louise can dance with the prestigious Denishaw company, Cora has her own agenda to accomplish. She had been sent west on an orphan train in her childhood, but wants to find out about her birth parents and her time at the New York home for Friendless Girls. She makes no headway with the nuns so decides to charm the handyman Joseph Schmidt - and finds a friend and later a lover. She does locate her birth mother, but the encounter is not what she expected. Chaperoning Louise is also not what she expected as the 15 year-old is a handful and a magnet for trouble. Meanwhile, Cora's society life and a long-held secret are waiting for her back in Wichita. How she reconciles who she has become in NYC with who she has been in Wichita is interesting and thoughtful if a little far-fetched. Fascinating look at the 1920s and the changing mores that represented a threat to the established norm. Apparently every age goes through this, but this book makes a case for open-mindedness and tolerance and the fact that life is never black and white.

This is a sweet coming-of-age story narrated by Evelyn Bucknow who is on the cusp of adolescence when the story begins, and ready for college by the end. She lives in Kerrville, KS ("the middle of nowhere, but the center of everything", "what everything else spirals out from") in a cheap, roadside apartment complex (Treeline Colonies) with her single mother, Tina. It is the Reagan era -- at least he is running for President and so the 80s time-frame was quite familiar. Evelyn is just becoming aware of the facts of life when her mother gets pregnant during an affair with her boss, which simultaneously ruins her job, her health and her relationship with Evelyn. Tina is already estranged from her family because she was not married to Evelyn's father who has never been in the picture. Only her grandmother, Eileen maintains contact with them and she saves Evelyn in more ways than one. While their relationship is not idyllic, she genuinely cares for her granddaughter (and daughter) and helps them financially, and while Tina is bedridden in her pregnancy, takes Evelyn to her church (Covenant of the Second Ark) to be saved. Her perception of God is touching: "I picture God sitting in front of a computer with blinking lights, putting on headphones when voice comes in like a radio frequency from far away. He turns dials, adjusts the headphones watching words flash on a screen." Evelyn is eager for a place to belong and this suits her for awhile, until her world gets more complicated as she gets older and her favorite science teacher is on the hotseat for teaching evolution. Evelyn questions everything, which leads to her growth. She also is walking through the minefield of friendships and relationships -- her best friend Deena and her crush Travis who also live at Treeline Colonies get together, making for an awkward threesome, but the only friends Evelyn has. She is smart and teachers encourage her to work hard and take advantage of opportunities. She in turn encourages Travis to do the same, but Deena is beautiful and lazy and not very good at school. You can guess where this is headed. When she ends up pregnant and they leave high school to get married the whole dynamic changes. "It's biology after all, pushing us into each other, pushing us around.... I think of dead moths inside a porch light, lemmings jumping to their deaths." Meanwhile, Tina gives birth to a premature baby boy, Samuel, who is dismissed as retarded (being the 80s) and she struggles to get services and to get through to her son. She and Evelyn repair their relationship and come to a steady peace. This is all a lot to juggle, but the plot is united well through Evelyn's self-discovery, growth and understanding of her life and her determination to make something of it. Good but not great.

Truly excellent! The way Ms. Moriarty wove together these 2 stories is incredible. Her description of life during the early 1900's was detailed and helped me understand how life truly was for women (and men) during that time.½

I liked this (and I like Louise Brooks), but it needed some structure beyond Cora's lifespan. Just when I thought things were wrapping up, there was MORE!

This was an enjoyable quick read but I didn't love it.