Edgar Degas’s wax-and-fabric statuette “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” has held the curiosity of millions in its 28 bronze reproductions, but far fewer know the heart-rending history of the model, Marie van Goethem, and her sisters. In “The Painted Girls,” a historically based work of fiction rich with naturalistic details of late-19th-century Paris, Cathy Marie Buchanan paints the girls who spring from the page as vibrantly as a dancer’s leap across a stage. --Susan Vreeland, Washington Post

As the story progresses, the sisters come dangerously close to self-destruction. 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 November 2012
The Little Dancer will be familiar to those who have seen her at the Clark.All welcome!