the jane austen book club by karen joy fowler

I know this because some of these readers are in my very own family.īut this is not a book about John Wilkes Booth. So why not John? I'm aware that some will read through the first sections in anticipation of finally getting to John's point of view. But the things she lived through are real enough–her father's fits and spells, the death of so many siblings, the strange arrival of the Mitchell cousins, her lion-tamer love. So little remains of Rosalie that I had to mostly make her up.

She can be hard to like, but there is such a person there. Wouldn't it be swell, I thought, if we felt the same fascination for people who don't kill presidents as we feel for those who do? Edwin, in particular, has a well-documented life filled with color and adventure, from the Wild West coast of the Gold Rush to the theaters of New York City.Īsia's difficult personality comes so vividly to us through her letters and books. Why did you choose to tell this story through the perspectives of Rosalie, Edwin, and Asia -and notably not through John's? But this is what made me think there might be a novel in the brothers and sisters of John Wilkes Booth. I am not the first writer to wonder if the families of the shooters should be added to that guilty list (and clearly the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no). A whole lot of people share responsibility for this dysfunctionality–those founders who were unclear when writing the Second Amendment, those people who make guns and also those who buy them, voting with their dollars to keep the whole bloody business lucrative, the NRA and their politicians, and, of course, the shooters. The United States is a very complicated place with regard to guns.

You touch upon this in your author's note: What did you want to explore in a book in which John Wilkes Booth is a prominent figure? In two interviews, Karen Joy Fowler discusses: Booth (2022), a novel exploring the family of Abraham Lincoln's infamous assassin, and her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club.

The jane austen book club by karen joy fowler