Cathy Marie Buchanan

In belle époque Paris, the Van Goethem sisters struggle for survival after the sudden death of their father, a situation that prompts young Marie's ballet training and her introduction to a genius painter.

The painted girls

Tylar M

*emmie*

Paris, 1878. Following their father's sudden death, the Van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opera, where for a scant seventeen francs a week, she will be trained to enter the famous Ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola's naturalist masterpiece L'Assommoir. Marie throws herself into dance and is soon modelling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized as Little Dancer Aged 14. Meanwhile, Antoinette, derailed by her love for the dangerous Émile Abadie, must choose between honest labour and the more profitable avenues open to a young woman of the Parisian demimonde. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of "civilized society." In the end, each will come to realize that her salvation--her survival, even--lies with the other.

The Painted Girls

Erin 

I DID IT. I AM DONE. I HAVE FINISHED THIS BOOK.

This is probably the longest I have ever taken to read a book ever. According to Goodreads, I started this book in March 2019. 2019! Nearly a year and a half ago! I'm so sad that it was terrible enough to take me this long. Any other book and I would have happily marked it as dnf and moved on in life. But I was so determined to read it. It had been sitting on my shelf for years, and it was always going to be my next read, until something else came along and bumped it again. And it's about my favourite topic, which is late 19th century France, and one of my favourite artists, Edgar Degas, and one of my MOST FAVOURITE sculptures, which is Little 14 Year Old Dancer, of which I have seen no less that 5 different copies of worldwide, because I love it SO MUCH. So I was determined to read it, and I am so terribly, terribly disappointed.

It is dreadfully slow and I struggled so much to be enthralled. I don't know what it is. I would hardly read 10 pages and it felt like 50. I would pick it up determined to finish, and barely make a dent. I just couldn't get myself dedicated to finishing it because it was so BORING. The two main characters, sisters, are hardly riveting. One is the aforementioned 14 year old dancer, the other a rejected ensemble member who begins an affair with a local bad boy, who unexpectedly later gets charged with murder? One moment we're going back and forth between ballet and the squalor home, and the next we are deep within a court case for the death of a local tavern mistress. It came completely out of nowhere and was very confusing. And what did it have to do with Degas' statue, at all? In fact, a significant later portion of the book has nothing to do with Degas at all, and we are only reminded of him and his sculpture when it finally goes to the salon on display. In the epilogue, the author explains what I assume is the intended connection between the two story lines, in that when Degas first displayed the sculpture, it was amongst similar sculptures of the faces of criminals, as he had a theory that criminality lay in the features of ones face. So was he suggesting that Marie, his model, or the petit-rat, in general, was criminal by nature? The author admits that otherwise, the court case with Emil Abadie and the van Goethem sisters are entirely unrelated, and had no overlap in history whatsoever. Frankly the whole last third to quarter of the book left me quite confused and all I wanted and signed up for was a story about a damn statue.

Anyway, I'm incredibly grateful to be done and wasn't sure if I would ever finish this. I would not recommend it, probably, and at the very least am certainly not in a position to recommend or otherwise, seeing as it took me OVER A YEAR to read what is, quite frankly, not that long of a book. But I'm DONE and that's all that matters.

The painted girls

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