The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty is a 367-page hardcover published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012.  The dust jacket is mildly shelf worn.  The bottom page edges have a black remainder mark.  Inside, the pages are clean, crisp and unmarked and the binding is solid. 

Book Summary

In 1922, only a few years before she will become a famous film actress and an icon for her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita for a summer in New York City and the avant-garde Denishaw school of dance.  Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year old chaperone.  Cora Carlisle is neither mother nor friend, just a respectable neighbor whom Louise's parents have hired for propriety's sake.  But upstanding, traditional Cora has her own private reason for making the trip.  For Cora, New York holds the promise of discovery that might answer 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.  Any while what she discovers 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 twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities of being fully alive.