The Painted Girls Cathy Marie Buchanan Cassandra Campbell 9781470847616 Books
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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 Cathy Marie Buchanan Cassandra Campbell 9781470847616 Books
The grace on the Opera stage contrasts sharply with the lives of the dancers backstage, many of whom, like Marie and Antoinette, are from the Paris gutters. The Painted Girls unflinchingly contains all the grit and blood of the Paris slums, though it is far more hopeful a tale than novels like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The alternating first person point of view plunks the reader right into Marie's tattered shoes or Antoinette's sweat-soaked washhouse clothes. That the narrative is in present tense adds an immediacy to the tale that keeps pages turning. As a mother, my heart alternately ached and swelled for those girls, especially because I have my own "little dancers" - ages eleven and seven. Neither of them will be reading The Painted Girls any time soon, but when they are grown, or at least nearly grown, I will hand them a new copy. My own will probably be as tattered as Marie's shoes by then.Product details
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Tags : The Painted Girls [Cathy Marie Buchanan, Cassandra Campbell] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Paris, 1878. Following their father’s sudden death, the Van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages,Cathy Marie Buchanan, Cassandra Campbell,The Painted Girls,Blackstone Audiobooks,1470847612,Historical - General,Literary,Unabridged Audio - FictionGeneral
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The Painted Girls Cathy Marie Buchanan Cassandra Campbell 9781470847616 Books Reviews
This novel focuses on19th century ballet in Paris, specifically sisters Antoinette, Marie and Charlotte van Goethem. This is not a novel of royalty or the rich. The van Goethems lived in the slums of Paris. After their father died, they had little money. Their mother was a laundress and much of her money was spent on feeding her addiction to absinthe. There was little if any left to feed her daughters or pay the rent. Antoinette who was oldest took over much of the mothering role. She was an extra in the ballet school of the Paris Opera and took on other jobs to get money for the rent and a little food. She also mended clothes and ballet shoes for her sister and provided them with the love that their mother should have given them. She helped her younger sisters get admitted to the ballet school where they too earned a little money.
The voice of the chapters alternates between that of Antoinette and Marie. The story portrays Marie as intelligent and somewhat educated although she considered herself ugly, she was admitted to the ballet school advanced rapidly. Antoinette was uneducated and unable to read, but she was street wise and became involved with a boy who engaged in criminal activities and took advantage of her. Charlotte, the youngest sister, was not given her own voice, but her sisters saw her as the prettiest. Yet she was cocky and tried to steal the limelight from Marie.
When Edgar Degas saw Marie, he hired her to model nude for many of his paintings of ballet "rats." Later he introduced her to a man who paid her to "model" and was supposed to protect her. Apparently these men were quite common and some protectors really wanted sex with the little girls.
I loved the prose and the descriptions of the lives of the girls and the hardships they endured. Each person's voice was unique and I knew who was "talking" even if the chapter titles hadn't been named after the girl. The story tugged at my heart strings when I read about the changes that Antoinette and Marie went through. It is a book that I can't quit thinking about.
People who don't like reading about ballet and ballet training or painting and sculpture may well not like this book. People who don't like books that show the seamier sides of life may not like it either, as it is dark, deals with poverty, prostitution, alcoholism and addiction to absinthe. Also, I know some readers don't like sex in books. This book involves sex. It shows scenes in which masturbation or intercourse occurred. It also deals with prostitution. It is not a book many would give to a pre-adolescent child. In other words, you may not like it even if I loved it.
What makes a great historical novel? In my view, it is taking a fragment of history, perhaps a newspaper article, or a snippet of an event, or in this case, a ballet dancer who otherwise would have been forgotten,and creating an unforgettable tale. Buchanan has done just that in creating the 19th C world of Paris. For a paltry few coins the fourteen year old Marie Goethem becomes the muse of Monsieur Degas and in so doing is immortalized. Buchanan has given life to Marie Goethem and her sisters, three impoverished ballet hopefuls who struggle to eat and survive in a world where everything is stacked against them. Buchanan weaves a story that, although imagined, has the possibility of being true. She clothes her tale in factual events and allows us to experience the underbelly of the Belle époque period. In doing so, she has given us an eagle's eye view of 19th C. Paris, with all its social inequalities. A period that shone like a jewel with its abundance of culture and enlightenment, yet beneath the surface teemed with poverty and tyranny. It was a world where ideas of prejudice and superiority infiltrated even the greatest of minds, and Buchanan manages to make it all real.
I would have given this book five stars, but I found some of the dialect annoying. The author intentionally made a choice to distinguish one sister from the other by their dialect, one having studied with nuns and the other being illiterate. However, I found it oft times distracting.
Otherwise, a not to be missed historical novel.
The grace on the Opera stage contrasts sharply with the lives of the dancers backstage, many of whom, like Marie and Antoinette, are from the Paris gutters. The Painted Girls unflinchingly contains all the grit and blood of the Paris slums, though it is far more hopeful a tale than novels like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The alternating first person point of view plunks the reader right into Marie's tattered shoes or Antoinette's sweat-soaked washhouse clothes. That the narrative is in present tense adds an immediacy to the tale that keeps pages turning. As a mother, my heart alternately ached and swelled for those girls, especially because I have my own "little dancers" - ages eleven and seven. Neither of them will be reading The Painted Girls any time soon, but when they are grown, or at least nearly grown, I will hand them a new copy. My own will probably be as tattered as Marie's shoes by then.
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