Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

In an effort to make this novel not about John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who killed Abraham Lincoln, the author goes a bit overboard--in my opinion--and writes a complex rendition of the whole Booth clan, and ends up with a book that is longer than is strictly necessary. This was longlisted for the 2022 Booker prize, but did not make the short list. John Wilkes Booth is born in 1838, the son of one of the era’s most famous stage actors, Junius Brutus Booth, and the ninth of 10 children. The Booths are a stage family, one in which--so says the author--the whole farm speaks in iambic pentameter when someone’s trying to learn lines. One son or another is always accompanying their father around the theaters of the East Coast, attempting to keep him sober enough to perform. On those rare occasions when Junius is home at the family’s farm outside Baltimore, his personality dominates the family. His declarations that the theater ought to be no place for his children, for whom he harbors middle-class dreams, are much less persuasive than the glamour he casts with every word, every gesture. He attempts to mold each of them, and he fails at every turn. As the children grow older, they launch careers and families of their own; many of those sons will become actors themselves, of various levels of success. One, Edwin, became a star; famous for his Hamlet, and he performed into the 1890's. They are not a close family, and they were not pro-slavery either, so in some ways, for me, the book raised more questions than it answered.