"Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler

Talk about your famous families or is it infamous? John Wilkes Booth, after all, goes down as one of the most loathsome villains in history but Fowler maintains this isn't a book about the assassin but rather about the theatrical Booth family.You have Junius Booth, the father and a Shakespearean actor; Edwin Booth, the son (and John Wilkes' younger brother) who successfully followed in his father's footsteps. Telling the story, Fowler has the two Booth girls, Rosalie and Asia.The scene is America, a country boiling with dissension that explodes into civil war. "Booth" is the portrait of a country in the throes of change and a family faced with conflict.In her interview with Steve Tarter, Fowler revealed the conundrum she faced in the book. "I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes Booth. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn't think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn't be writing about his family, if he weren't who he was, if he hadn't done what he did."