He Has Shot the President!: April 14, 1865: The Day John Wilkes Booth Killed President Lincoln by Don Brown (review)

This new entry in Brown’s Actual Times series revisits April 14, 1865, when actor John Wilkes Booth fired the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln. The constraint of sixty-four heavily illustrated pages naturally means that the events surrounding the fatal shot are condensed, but Brown uses that compression to his advantage in capturing the urgency in which the frantic manhunt for Lincoln’s killer proceeded alongside the solemnities of Lincoln’s funeral rites and how concurrent assassination plots against Vice-President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward played (or failed to play) out. As in other titles from this series, information unfolds in one continuous story, sans chapter breaks; fluent storytelling and copious illustration, with plenty of quotations and variety of sentence length, assist readers steadily through the text. Roughly sketched scenes with watercolor wash are equally successful at conveying moments of high drama and profound sadness. Middle-graders who have discovered Brown’s series on pivotal episodes in American history will welcome this latest title.