Bess Heath is born to a life of privilege, one bound by Edwardian convention and a duty to marry well. But in 1915, on the verge of her eighteenth birthday, she returns home from school to an unfamiliar scene - the elegance of the life she once knew has vanished, her father is a broken man, jobless and losing hope, and her mother is struggling to keep the family afloat. Isabel, the lively, charismatic sister Bess has always relied on is almost unrecognisable. Her engagement called off, she languishes in her bedroom, brooding and refusing to eat. And all the while the society Bess has always known faces its own transition - one where the magnificence of Niagara Falls is threatened by the power companies that seek to harness its power for themselves. Forced into an early adulthood, Bess finds solace with riverman Tom Cole, against her family's strong objections. He is not from their world. Rough-hewn and guileless, Tom has as uncanny knack for reading the Niagara's whims and a reputation for daring rescues on the river. He understands better than anyone the awesome and potentially devastating power of the falls and consoles her through a tragedy that nearly ruins her. But as their lives become more fully entwined, Bess is forced to make a painful choice between what she wants and what is best for her family...

The Day the Falls Stood Still

Religion & Spirituality

Cathy Marie Buchanan

Literature & Fiction

Hutchinson Radius

It's Niagara Falls, 1915. When Bess Heath returns to her family home near the picturesque falls, it is to an unfamiliar scene - the elegance of the life she once knew has vanished. Her father is a broken man, jobless and losing hope, and her mother is struggling to keep the family afloat. Isabel, the lively, charismatic sister Bess has always relied on is almost unrecognisable. Her engagement called off, she languishes in her bedroom, brooding and refusing to eat. Through all of this Bess finds solace in Tom Cole, a man she met by chance the night she returned home. Constant, gentle and devoted to Bess, he understands better than anyone the awesome and potentially devastating power of the falls - and consoles her through a tragedy that nearly ruins her. But as their lives become more fully entwined, Bess is forced to make a painful choice between what she wants and what is best for her family...

Day the Falls Stood Still

WINDMILL

[Library Edition Audiobook CD in vinyl case.] Paris, 1878. Following the death of their father from overwork, the three Van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without their father's wages, and with what little their mother earns as a laundress disappearing down the absinthe bottle, eviction from their single boarding room seems imminent. With few options for work available for a girl, bookish fourteen-year-old Marie and her younger sister Charlotte are dispatched to the Paris Opera, where for a scant seven francs a week, the girls will be trained to enter its famous ballet. Their older sister, stubborn and insolent seventeen-year-old Antoinette, dismissed from the ballet, finds herself launched into the orbit of Emile Zola and the influence of his notorious naturalist masterpiece L'Assommoir -- and into the arms of a young man who may turn out to be a murderer. Marie throws herself into dance, hoping her natural gift and hard work will enable her to escape her circumstances, but the competition to become one of the famous etoiles at whose feet flowers are thrown nightly is fierce, and Marie is forced to turn elsewhere to make money. Cripplingly self-conscious about her low-class appearance, she nonetheless finds herself modeling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized in his controversial sculpture Little Dancer, Aged 14. Antoinette, meanwhile, descends lower and lower in society and must make the choice between honest labor as a laundress and the more profitable avenues available to a young woman in the Paris demimonde -- that is unless her love for the dangerous Emile Abadie derails her completely. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change, The Painted Girls is ultimately a tale of two remarkable girls rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of ''civilized society.'' In the end, each will come to realize that her individual salvation, if not survival, lies with the other.

The Painted Girls Lib/E

Literary

Blackstone Publishing

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Books by Cathy Marie Buchanan