The Paris Opera's ballet girls. A fascination that has never really faded, in no small part thanks to the works of Edgar Degas, who painted the "petite rats" not as the public wished to imagine them, but as they really were. 
 In 1873 a former ballet girl takes her two young sisters to the Paris Opera to secure them places in the corps' training school, in hopes of at least one making the cut... and 70 francs per month. Mother's wages as a laundress mostly go on absinthe, and their salaries will keep the landlord at bay... they hope. 
 So it begins. Back to Paris, but a different Paris. Not the celebrated salons of the upper classes, nor the grubby bohemian life of Montmartre .. but somewhere in between. Caught between the Glitterati and the Underworld live the artists- the dancers, painters and songbirds in their expensive cages of silk. And so easy it is to tip into the darker worlds below. 
 The author draws a beautiful and thought provoking portrait of the lives of the most celebrated waifs ever, as immortalized by Degas, whose works are the warp to the weft of Buchanan's fiction. So thin the line between wealth and starvation, laundress and drunkard, dancer and whore. A line far too many of us tread today. The Painted Girls stands as a reminder to society that sometimes the only difference between honesty and criminality is how much bread is on the table, but does so without ever becoming preachy. Buchanan simply tells the story, and that is enough.