The realism of the figurine noticeably confuses the public. With his first blow, Degas overturns the traditions of sculpture. Just as a few years ago he shook the foundations of painting. Le Figaro, April 1881

The whole world admires Edgar Degas’s sculpture “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer,” considered one of the most realistic works of modern art. However, few people know that the prototype of the famous sculpture is a real teenage girl Marie van Goethem from a poor Parisian family. Information about Marie's fate is rather sketchy, but Kathy Buchanan, relying on known facts and her own imagination, has recreated a vivid and realistic panorama of Paris at the end of the 19th century. Three sisters - Antoinette, Marie and Charlotte - huddle in a tiny room with a laundress mother who is not interested in affairs of daughters. But the girls have a goal - to graduate from the ballet school at the Grand Opera and dance on its stage. To achieve their dreams, they have to go through many tests: to survive unhappy love, to miraculously escape the lustful clutches of “art connoisseurs”, not to drown in the pool of oblivion that absinthe gives, not to give up and not to lose heart!16+