THE PAINTED GIRLS by Cathy Marie Buchanan

In the late 1800s in Paris, an impoverished teenage girl could earn a small wage in a variety of occupations:  as a ballet dancer, as an artist’s model, as a washerwoman, and, of course, in a brothel.  In this tale of three fatherless sisters, Antoinette, Marie, and Charlotte manage to scrape by, while their mother finds solace in drink.  Antoinette washes out as a dancer, while Marie and Charlotte show promise and advance to the stage.  Marie is the only one of the three who can read, and when the newspaper publishes an article about how a person’s facial features can predict their behavior, Marie feels that her monkey-like face has doomed her.  Antoinette, on the other hand, becomes infatuated with Emile, who, along with a cruel friend, is arrested for murder.  If Emile can escape the guillotine, he will be banished to New Caledonia, and Antoinette begins scheming to join him there.  One reviewer wrote that this book is part love story, but I don’t see it as that at all.  It is a story of the bond of sisters, united in their struggle to survive, and the rift that a boy can create.  In this case, Antoinette is blind to Emile’s flaws, while Marie sees nothing else.  I feared for these girls throughout the book.  They have no adult supervision or role models, and they do as they please:  visiting convicts in jail, modeling in the nude, going to bars, attending theatre productions, going to work at 4:00 am.  They’re like mini-adults but without the good judgment that comes with maturity and experience.  Ultimately, Marie makes a decision that widens the gap between her and Antoinette and has unforeseen consequences.  I love how, near the end, the author matches the frenetic pace of the story with paragraph-long chapters, alternating narrators, as she has all along.