This expertly-crafted historical fiction novel is not about John Wilkes Booth, but about his siblings, which is a rather unique take. ( )

Highly detailed novel telling the history of the Booth family, made infamous by the aggreived white assassin of Lincoln, John Wilkes. Fowler focuses on the patriarch, Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, who eloped to America (Maryland) from England with a young wife he married before neglecting to divorce his current wife. It take a few years for this to be exposed, by which time he had fathered 10 children, 4 of whom did not survive childhood. The main narrative moves among son Edwin, who himself became a famous actor, and daughters Asia and Rosalie. John Wilkes is seen only through their eyes, as he is pointedly not the book's focus. He was an outlier, apparently, the only Confederate sympathizer in the family. Though the family portrait is one of instability, financial insecurity, alcoholism, illness, and death. that does not appear to cause or explain the political violence. On the whole, I found this to be a very absorbing read.


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This work of historical fiction focuses more on the family of John Wilkes Booth than on the man himself. Junius, the father, was an acclaimed actor, but he was also an alcoholic, mentally unstable, and unpredictable. He raised sons who were also actors, but who also became alcoholics, and had periods of instability. It was this background that formed John Wilkes Booth into the man he would become. It was fascinating to read about his siblings and parents, especially his father, the life they led, and the people they became. Well written with many facts, this fictional account is gripping from the beginning to the end. ( )

In an “Author’s Note” toward the end of Booth, Karen Joy Fowler notes that the germ of this book came from thinking about America’s mass shootings and the families of the shooters. “How,” she asked herself, “would such a family deal with their own culpability?”
This led her to the gifted, troubled family of the actor and bigamist Junius Brutus Booth and the ten children he had with the woman he ran off to America with in an act of Byronic madness.
The ninth of these children was John Wilkes, whose flair for the dramatic gesture led him to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. There he crossed paths with Abraham Lincoln, whom he slays.
Throughout the book, as Fowler weaves her narrative, changing viewpoints from one sibling to another (but never taking that of John Wilkes), she includes insets of Lincoln’s unfolding life that suggest parallels in the trajectories of his life and that of the man who took it.
A recurring motif is Shakespeare, two plays in particular. One is “Richard III,” one of the elder Booth’s staples (“no role is so completely Father’s own as that of the murdering and murdered king”). The other is “Hamlet,” in which John Wilkes’ brother Edwin became the definitive interpreter of his time of the ghost-haunted prince of Denmark who avenged his father’s murder. Of course, no writings, except for the Bible, affected Lincoln as deeply as Shakespeare.
Fowler closes by noting that she was in final edits during the insurrection of January 6, 2021, when she saw “the flag of the Confederacy carried through the halls of the Capitol for the very first time.” She ends: “Let it be the last.”
This sense of the past as prologue gives the book much of its poignancy but also points to a flaw. This is not a biography but historical fiction. Yet, from time to time, Fowler breaks genre. A reader attuned to history immediately responds to the first mention of theatre owner John T. Ford, or Laura Keene’s overwhelming success with “Our American Cousin,” or John Wilkes’ attraction to the Virginia state flag with its motto “sic semper tyrannis,” and accepts these as a legitimate use of foreshadowing. But Fowler also intrusively brings the story up to date. For example, after Maryland—without seceding from the Union—blocks the route of conscripts from the North, leading Lincoln to impose countermeasures little short of military occupation, Maryland adopts a new state song exulting how the state “spurns the Northern scum!” Fowler notes the repeated failed attempts to replace it, most recently in 2020. These lapses resemble an actor on stage breaking the fourth wall, and they jar.
Aside from these, though, I found the book readable. It’s a particular achievement that, in relating a story whose conclusion is all-too-well known, Fowler can hold one’s attention. In fact, the closer the inevitable climax approached, the more difficulty I had in putting it down. ( )

At the end of the book, in the author's note, Fowler cites the prevalence of mass shootings in our country, which led her to wonder how the families of these shooters could live with their own culpability. How do you love a person who is a monster, she asks. This fictionalized account of the Booth family is her attempt to address that question.

We learn about Junius Brutus Booth, celebrated (and often intoxicated) actor, who leaves his wife and young son in England and emigrates to America with another woman, Mary Ann, and they produce another family of children, 10 in all. The stain of illegitimacy and the early deaths of 4 of the children, along with the persistent presence of alcohol, casts a pall on the family. Still, 3 of the remaining boys become actors themselves, including John Wilkes. The family side with the Union in the years leading up to the Civil War, but John Wilkes, because of time spent living in the South, pulls for the Confederacy. The story takes us into the imagined lives of many of the siblings, including Rosalie and Asia, and culminates in a radicalized John Wilkes assassinating Lincoln.

For me, the most interesting parts of this story took place late, with each sibling reacting to their now infamous relative, and how his infamy impacted their lives. It's a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

The author includes, in her author's note, that the election of Donald Trump waylaid this project for a year. Eventually she understood how history was repeating itself, and it gave her the motivation to continue. Let me quote a remarkable paragraph:

"The Lost Cause (the Confederacy) may be temporarily mislaid, but it has never been lost. Whenever Black people exercise genuine political power in this country, the assassin appears, the crowd rises. This is the history of America and there is no escaping it. Abraham Lincoln told us so." ( )