The Painted Girls, Cathy Marie Buchanan
The Painted Girls, Cathy Marie Buchanan
2 Rating(s)
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
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The Painted Girls

Author: Cathy Marie Buchanan

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell, Julia Whelan, and Danny Campbell

Unabridged: 12 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/10/2013


Synopsis

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 fourteen-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 seventeen-year-old Antoinette, dismissed from the ballet, finds herself launched into the orbit of mile Zola and the influence of his notorious naturalist masterpieceLAssommoirand 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 toiles 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 sculptureLittle 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 demimondethat is unless her love for the dangerous mile Abadie derails her completely.Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change,The Painted Girlsis 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.

About Cathy Marie Buchanan

Cathy Marie Buchanan was born and raised in Niagara Falls and lives in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in some of Canada's premier journals, including the Antigonish Review, the Dalhousie Review, Descant, and the New Quarterly. She is the recipient of grants from both the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Cameran

To be quite honest, I have been sitting on my review of The Painted Girls for a few hours as I attempt to collect my thoughts so I can put into words why this book was such a disappointment in my eyes. Set in the late 1800s in Paris, the details of the life, the smells, the streets, the art, and the......more

I found this book to be sad and disturbing for most of the story. It definitely does not depict the prosperous time of peace and prosperity of the Belle Epoque. Rather, it depicts the seedier side of Paris ,as the story of Antoinette and her sister Marie is told. There is no prosperity here for thes......more

Goodreads review by Heidi

Three sisters live in poverty. Their father is dead and their mother is addicted to absinthe. They have to find a way to feed themselves. The Paris Opera is an option, but ballet is expensive. There's lessons and clothing to buy. And whatever money they do manage to scrape together, there's no guarant......more

Goodreads review by Emma

2.75......more

Goodreads review by Nancy

I was fortunate to get an ARC of THE PAINTED GIRLS. It is a brilliantly written historical fiction set in Paris in the 1880's. A story about the lives of sisters trying to make their way through life under less than ideal circumstances. Do the girls have control over their destiny or is it fate that......more