"The Painted Girls"

Cathy Marie Buchanan is the author of the national bestseller The Day the Falls Stood Still, a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection and an Indie Next pick.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Painted Girls, and reported the following:

In The Painted Girls we hear, in alternating chapters, from Marie van Goethem, who tells her story of modelling for Edgar Degas’s famous sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, and her older sister Antoinette, who gives an account of her love affair with the dangerous Émile Abadie, a teenage boy featured in Degas’s pastel Criminal Physiognomies.

On page 69 of The Painted Girls, we learn from Antoinette that she is marking the days in her calendar that she is “adored” (that is made love to) by Abadie. It’s a quiet moment in the book, but the calendar and its markings will come to play a significant role in providing an alibi when Abadie is—true to life—accused of a grisly murder and in deciding the fate of the sisters’ relationship.

Learn more about the book and author at Cathy Marie Buchanan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue