03/12/2022
📚BOOKSELLER REVIEW📚
BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler
The Booths were famous, even infamous, in America well before John Wilkes fired his gun at Ford's Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865. Patriarch Junius was the leading stage actor of his generation, despite scandalous behavior that included bigamy, mania, and dangerous alcohol-fueled escapades; his sons, including John, took up his theatrical mantle, becoming celebrities in their own right. This skillfully researched fiction examines the lives and psyches of the entire large clan, including its reticent mothers and daughters as well as its very public fathers and sons. Fowler is a writer's writer at the top of her game, deft with character-revealing detail, and she's painted here a definitive portrait of a loving family doing its best during trying times in an politically divided country. The novel climaxes with Lincoln's assassination, as every reader must know from the start, but the haunting, hopeful possibility that it won't remains palpable until the last moments. —James
