Cathy Marie Buchanan's The Painted Girls explores belle epoque Paris from the point of view of the teenage student dancer who modeled for Edgar Degas's sculpture The Little Dancer, Age Fourteen. Loosely inspired by the true story of the van Goethem sisters of Montmartre, Buchanan's story follows Marie, a struggling ballet dancer, and her older sister, Antoinette, as they battle what seems an inevitable fate of destitution and despair.
When their father dies, leaving only their alcoholic mother to care for them, the sisters face the challenge of simple survival. Hoping to earn enough money for food and shelter, Marie enrolls in dancing school. Every girl there cherishes the dream of outshining the others, and attracting the patronage of the abonnés--wealthy men with a particular interest in dancers. First, though, Marie attracts the attention of Degas, who asks her to model for him.
Buchanan describes the world of 19th-century Parisian ballet in meticulous detail. The Painted Girls underscores the grim need that fuels the dancers, raw emotion that found its way into the works of Degas in violent slashes of pastel. What may be most remarkable in the novel, however, are the relationships between the female characters--Marie and her schoolmate Blanche; Antoinette and the beautiful prostitute Colette. The heart of the novel is the love between the sisters, which forms the bedrock of their lives--and will become, in a convergence of tragic events, what is ultimately most at stake. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post