For the first time, I am reading and rating books as long list candidates for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Booth was ultimately one of my three choices, and the one I enjoyed most and considered the best-written. Apparently I had inadvertently overlooked it when I made my initial selections, or perhaps it was added at a later point, but as we reached the last week of the rating period, I knew I could fit in one more, and I made a wonderful selection, because it turned out to be an outstanding work of historical fiction.
Even though it was published last year, I was given access to an advance copy of the e-book, which I found so compelling that I could hardly put my iPad down, and was reading at every possible opportunity. I finished the 480 or so pages over three days, and was sorry when I came to the end, something I haven't experienced all that often lately.
It is the somewhat fictionalized story of the Booth family of actors which most tragically included Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, the next-to-youngest of the ten children. Booth's father was the famous Shakespearian actor Junius Brutus Booth, and John Wilkes's brothers Junius and Edwin were also actors, Edwin having the most illustrious career of them all. New York's Booth Theater on 45th Street in the current Theater District was named for Edwin. Edwin and the other members of the Booth family were Union loyalists, with John the exception. Booth's mother was Mary Ann Holmes, his father's mistress, whom he eventually married once he was divorced from his first wife, but the children were all born illegitimately.
The Booths lived in Maryland, near Bel Air, about twenty-five miles northeast of Baltimore, first in a rustic and remote cabin on a farm, then in a large house built by Junius Sr. They also had a town house in Baltimore. These locations figure importantly in the book, along with others in Philadelphia, New York, and Richmond.
The book follows the family chronologically through the births (and the many deaths) of the children, their education, entry into adulthood and beyond, until the assassination and capture of John. It particularly portrays the lives of John, Edwin, and their sisters Rosalie and Asia, who was especially close to John. The Booth family story is interspersed with brief chapters that recount Lincoln's political career, his speeches, and episodes from his presidency, leading up to his death, which provides a paralleling timeframe and account of his rise to the White House.
Much of the book is based on historical fact, with the fictional aspects being the conversations and imagined internal lives of the main characters. Anyone who has read non-fiction books such as Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, or studied even the basics of the Civil War era will recognize that the trajectory of events is quite realistic, but reading what the author Karen Joy Fowler imagines of the family interactions, motivations, and thoughts of the principal characters truly brings them to life and makes them all the more compelling. Her skill brings these historical events out of the past and into the present, with all of its current strife between today's political parties and the culture wars that are causing so much struggle now. The similarities of the gulfs between today's Democrats and Republicans are chillingly striking...
I highly recommend this title for readers interested in history, politics, and theater.
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