Years ago, I fell in cover love with a book entitled The Center of Everything by an author I had never heard of, Laura Moriarty. Though I have been severely burned by cover love before, this was not one of those cases. The Center of Everything was one of the most amazing books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. I went on to read subsequent books by Ms. Moriarty because of my love of The Center of Everything. When I was approached to review her latest book, The Chaperone, I jumped at the chance and I was not disappointed.

The first thing that I loved about this book was the setting. Though a specific year is never given, it is during the 1920s. Women have the right to vote but Prohibition is in effect. I love absolutely everything about the 1920s! It is one of my favorite time periods to read about and for novels to be set in. Moriarty did a fabulous job of capture this era. She truly evoke the time period through her elegant prose. She also capture the struggle between older generations and younger generations that pervaded this time period. Cora and Louise bring a personal touch to this tumultuous time period, but in ways that affected their everyday lives. Cora, though by no means old, is representative of that older generation of women who reject the new fashion of wearing makeup or trading in their corsets for a bra. Louise is of the younger generation that has trouble relating to why Cora, and those like her, see these societal changes as bad and to be rejected. Cora even acting as Louise’s chaperone is troubling to Louise because she has a completely different mindset about propriety and societal standards than does Cora.

Cora and Louise are such great characters and play off of each other tremendously. Cora has this amazingly heartbreaking past that she is contending with, but so does Louise. How they handle the tragedy that has befallen then is fascinating. Their pasts, as pasts are want to do, continue to invade and influence their presents. This creates a lot of tension between the characters and I enjoyed that. I also enjoyed them individually. Cora was so real and likeable. Louise, well I want to smack her a lot, but I loved her zest for life and her enthusiasm that just couldn’t be dampened.

The plot of the novel was good. I would say that I enjoyed the first half of the novel much more than I did the last half. I found the first half to be quite strong and I was very intrigued by the events that unfolded for Cora and Louise in the first half of the novel. The latter half lacked some of the urgency that the first half possessed. This made reading that last half a little tedious. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, I simply preferred the first half of the book.

Overall, I did enjoy this novel. I would recommend it to others, though my favorite work by this author remains The Center of Everything.