~ Trade Paperback
~ Winner of the OLA Evergreen Award - 2014
1878 Paris. Following their father's sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended and eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With only a few options available to them, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opera where she learns dance and stumbles into modelling, while her sister Antoinette struggles to retain honest work . . .
Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale inspired by the real-life model for Degas' Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and by the era's most notorious criminal trials to create a portrait of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of civilized society.
"A captivating story of fate, tarnished ambition and the ultimate triumph of sister-love, Buchanan paints the girls who spring from the page as vibrantly as a dancer's leap across a stage." -- Washington Post