The Painted Girls Lib/E

Paris, 1878. Following the death of their father from overwork, the three van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without their father's 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 ├ëmile Zola and the influence of his notorious naturalist masterpiece L'Assommoir--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 ├(R)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 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 ├ëmile 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.

About the Author :
Cathy Marie Buchanan was born and raised in Niagara Falls and lives in Toronto. Her short stories have appeared in many of Canada's premier literary journals. She holds a BSc and an MBA from the University of Western Ontario and is the recipient of grants from both the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council. She is the author of The Day the Falls Stood Still, a New York Times bestseller and Barnes & Noble Recommends selection. Original bio sent from Cassandra: Cassandra Campbell began doing voice overs as the voice for Calvin Klein's Italian commercials. This was followed by commercial and documentary recording in both English and Italian. She has recorded many audiobooks and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie(R) Award nomination. As an actress and director, she has worked at the Public, the Mint, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stagewest, Theatreworks, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Millmountain Theatre, the National Shakespeare Company, and the New York Fringe Festival. Julia Whelan is a novelist, screenwriter, lifelong actor, and multiple award-winning audiobook narrator. She graduated with a degree in English and creative writing from Middlebury College and Oxford University. She is a former child actor who has appeared in multiple films and television shows. Danny Campbell is an Earphones Award-winning narrator and an actor who has appeared in CBS' The Guardian, the films A Pool, a Fool, and a Duel and Greater Than Gravity, and in over twenty-five commercials. He is a company member of the Independent Shakespeare Company in Los Angeles and is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College.

Review :
"The Painted Girls offers the best of historical fiction." -- "Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters" "A dark valentine to Belle Èpoque Paris." -- "Vogue" "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." -- "Melanie Benjamin, author of Alice I Have Been" "Beautiful and haunting. From the first page, I was swept up and enchanted." -- "Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot" "Buchanan does a masterful job of interweaving historical figures into her plot, but it is the moving yet unsentimental portrait of family love, of two sisters struggling to survive with dignity, that makes this a must-read." -- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)" "Cassandra Campbell, Julia Whelan, and Danny Campbell do a fine job of using a French accent to speak the French words while reading the English clearly...Well done and is a joy to experience." -- "SoundCommentary.com" "Exquisite...A realistically robust portrait of working-class life in late nineteenth-century Paris." -- "Booklist" "I guarantee, you will never look at Edgar Degas's immortal sculpture of the Little Dancer in quite the same way again." -- "Kate Alcott, author of The Dressmaker" "Rich...Engrossing." -- "Publishers Weekly" "Richly imagined." -- "Entertainment Weekly" "The narrators transport listeners to the slums and back-alleys of Belle-Epoque Paris...Earthy, erotic, always truthful--this is must listening. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award." -- "AudioFile"