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Title: The Painted Girls

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Cathy Marie Buchanan

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell, Julia Whelan, Danny Cambell

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-10-13

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 466 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Paris, 1878: Following the death of their father from overwork, the three van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without their fathers wages, and with what little their mother earns as a laundress disappearing down the absinthe bottle, eviction from their single boarding room seems imminent. With few options for work available for a girl, bookish 14-year-old Marie and her younger sister Charlotte are dispatched to the Paris Opera, where for a scant seven francs a week, the girls will be trained to enter its famous ballet. Their older sister, stubborn and insolent 17-year-old Antoinette, dismissed from the ballet, finds herself launched into the orbit of Émile Zola and the influence of his notorious naturalist masterpiece LAssommoir - and into the arms of a young man who may turn out to be a murderer.

Marie throws herself into dance, hoping her natural gift and hard work will enable her to escape her circumstances, but the competition to become one of the famous étoiles at whose feet flowers are thrown nightly is fierce, and Marie is forced to turn elsewhere to make money. Cripplingly self-conscious about her low-class appearance, she nonetheless finds herself modeling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized in his controversial sculpture Little Dancer, Aged 14. Antoinette, meanwhile, descends lower and lower in society and must make the choice between honest labor as a laundress and the more profitable avenues available to a young woman in the Paris demimonde - that is unless her love for the dangerous Émile Abadie derails her completely.

Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change, The Painted Girls is ultimately a tale of two remarkable girls rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of "civilized society". In the end, each will come to realize that her individual salvation, if not survival, lies with the other.

Critic Reviews:

The Painted Girls is historical fiction at its finest, awash in period details of the Paris of Degas and Zola while remaining, at its heart, the poignant story of two sisters struggling to stay together even as they find themselves pulled toward different, and often misunderstood, dreams. Cathy Marie Buchanan also explores the uneasy relationship between artist and muse with both compassion and soul-searing honesty. (Melanie Benjamin, author of Alice I Have Been)

Sisters, dance, art, ambition, and intrigue in late 1800s Paris. The Painted Girls offers the best of historical fiction: compelling characters brought backstage at lOpera and front and center in Degas studio. This one has book club favorite written all over it. (Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters)

Will hold you enthralled as it spools out the vivid story of young sisters in late nineteenth century Paris struggling to transcend their lives of poverty through the magic of dance. I guarantee, you will never look at Edgar Degass immortal sculpture of the Little Dancer in quite the same way again. (Kate Alcott, author of The Dressmaker)

Members Reviews:

Only a Pastel Version of the *Beautiful Era*

A beautiful carving is made at the expense of all that is thrown away...a thought that describes this story of the young *ballet rat* that poses for Edgar Degas's sculpture, (Little Dancer of Fourteen) her family, and the Belle Epoque period of France.