Featured Book: The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan

Sara Trucksess

The Painted Girls: A Novel by Cathy Marie Buchanan is a fictional study of the underbelly of Parisian society in the early 1880’s. Drawing inspiration from Edgar Degas’ famous statue, Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (1881), the author creates an intimate portrait of three lower-class sisters seeking salvation from a life as laundresses by attempting to work their way through the hierarchy of the Paris Opera’s newly famous ballet school.

All knobbly knees and jutted out chin, the real life Degas statuette’s depiction of a young ballerina is given a tender background in this novel. Growing up at a time when even the very shape of your skull could send you to prison for showing aspects of criminal physiognomy, fictional heroine Marie van Goethem is given more chances than most to rise out of destitution. As “petits rats“ (literally, little rats, describing the lowest level of young dancers who flock to the Opera to try their chances at fame and fortune), Marie and her sisters, Antoinett…