John Wilkes Booth was born into a family of pretenders. Although they were also farmers, they made their living, largely by acting. Although, there was a great deal of dysfunction in the family emotionally, morally they were against the practice of slavery. While they had slaves, they paid them a wage and allowed them to purchase their freedom. Perhaps the life of John Wilkes Booth took such a turn for the worse because the lines of morality were often blurred in his lifestyle. Slavery, alcoholism, debauchery, bigamy, and so many more contradictions all figured into his history. His upbringing had to have been somewhat confusing for him. Still, none of the other 9 siblings entertained such murderous thoughts or behavior, as he did. I wondered if perhaps, in the end, he could not tell the difference between what was real and what was not. One of the youngest of the siblings, he was a carefree, precocious child, by all accounts, and there was no way to have predicted the heinous act he eventually carried out. However, some of his pranks, if true, surely did indicate a mind that was not perfectly sound. Perhaps we are all somewhat good and evil.
The author chose to use a sibling that was least known, the spinster sister, Rosalie, to illustrate the story of the family of the murderer of Abraham Lincoln. She describes the grief for the losses the family suffered, the interactions of the siblings, their rivalry, the parents lifestyles, and how what could have been an ordinary, talented man, was instead whipped into a frenzy influenced by the politics of the day, the prejudices of man, and the madness of his own interpretations of life at the time he grew up, the time of the Civil War. Perhaps the moral atmosphere and the divisiveness of the times simply exacerbated the genetic thread of madness and emotional distress that ran through the Booth family, and they all merged together to create the monster that murdered a President who was larger than life and changed our world for the better.
At first, I thought that the author was trying to humanize Booth, to give him a more sympathetic history, but gradually, I was disabused of that idea and realized she was just defining his metamorphosis into a murderer. Fowler does not present Lincoln as a perfect person either, and intimates that his first efforts were not to free the slaves and make them equal, but just to guarantee them certain rights. In addition, he was not wound too tight emotionally either. He was a man driven by the problems of the day and the need to fix them. Politically, the time was right for a man of his stature and beliefs. Fortunately, freedom for slaves was the ultimate outcome of a war that tore the country apart and made us, forever after, question our own motives and feelings about how people are treated.
The author has married fact and fiction to present a picture of the family that John Wilkes Booth was born into, the tragedies and celebrations of the family are given air to breathe and the reader is free to determine which of them they believe and which of them they may doubt as rumor. Obviously, the author has done an enormous amount of research into a subject that moved her deeply, still, she has taken a great deal of poetic license. The story was sometimes repetitive since so many of the sibling’s lives were explored. Also, at times, the story seemed more realistic than at others, but at all times, this story was truly engaging and enlightening. I learned much more about the possible background of the Booth family than I had ever known before. Fowler painted Booth as the monster he turned into, a creature whose mind, in the end, was in an alternate universe of his own making. He was not beloved for his act of horror, as he had hoped he would be.

In conclusion, the book was interesting, but a bit confusing because of the fact that at first, I wasn’t sure which John Wilkes Booth was being portrayed. Apparently, it was a name handed down from generation to generation, and the family’s history was in the theater. Because so many siblings' lives were described, the time line often meandered and the thread became repetitive. However, the author deftly knitted quotes from Shakespeare and others, writings from diaries, some moments of the supernatural with ghostly visitations, and newspaper stories into a very creative book about the Booth family, their relationships, loyalties, politics, rivalries, and love for each other, beginning with the grandparents early in the 1800’s, and continuing to explain the development of the family even after the murder, so that the reader glimpsed into the window of their lives to see how they coped with their traumas. I was surprised that the Booths were able to continue any kind of normal life after the assassination, so great was the effect on the population and so great was the effect on their lives when they and the world discovered that such evil lurked in the mind and body of a brother that was loved so dearly. Although fantasy was blended with reality, much of it seemed very plausible, especially the descriptions of the actual history, the draft riots, the fires in the theaters, life on the farm, the abuse of indigenous people and slaves, and the actual murder and attempted murders.

I would be remiss if I didn’t make a comment about the notes from the author. For me, when Fowler chose to go off script to conflate former President Trump with the heinous behavior of John Wilkes Booth, it was a bridge too far. President Trump was not the cause of any deaths, on the contrary, there were fewer military deaths during his tenure, crime did not rise, the economy hummed. There were no wars during his administration, he did not divide the country, although the media did, did not commit treason, but was falsely accused of crimes he never committed. He did a great deal for the black community, and overall, he improved the lot of minorities and the impoverished. He did not enslave anyone, nor did he promote the prejudice that he has been accused of; that was done by his enemies. It is obvious that the author dislikes him and that is her privilege, but her personal feelings were defined by the politics of our times and a good deal of news about him that unfairly maligned him. Putting the fiction of her own beliefs on the pages of her book, beliefs that were gleaned from many news stories that blended fact and fiction, to support the party she supports, detracted from a book that would otherwise have left a far better impression on me. If January 6th was an insurrection, what were the months and months of riots and destruction called? Absent her own personal, a bit biased politics, the novel was eye opening and well researched.