3.5
The Wind Done Gone
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Wind Done Gone Reviews
3.5
“I will begin this review with a note that Gone with the Wind is my favorite novel, so the review you read below is certainly colored by my own biases that I hold in relation to the sanctity of that novel, in all of its easily recognizable moral flaws to a modern reader.
This book was a hard read for me. Not because the text was dense or long, but because of its defiling of its source material. I generally enjoy, for lack of a better term, reading Neo-Slave narratives that give voice to those who were forced into silence by paper, privilege, patriarchy, and prejudice. Though Neo-Slave narratives are not primary sources from those who were enslaved, they do provide a sense of the horrors that we in the South have been conditioned to move past. I say all of this in an effort to contextualize the duality of my feelings on this novel. On the one hand, I appreciate what it is doing as far as how it fits into its sub-genre of historical fiction.
As I mentioned earlier, it does suffer from its source material. Unlike other Neo-Slave narratives like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, it is not centrally based on the life or lives of a historical figure; the novel is based on another novel’s characters and events. As the title suggests, the story is based on Gone with the Wind. With the novel being marked as “unauthorized,” none of the characters or place names in Gone with the Wind could be used in this work, but, if one is familiar with Gone with the Wind, these characters and places are easily decipherable. This could have been a smart move; it’s certainly a unique one. Gone with the Wind is known for its perpetuation of the Lost Cause Myth and its depiction of plantation life as an ideal world. So, in using those stories characters and adding voices to that story, that narrative is being more inclusive of voices silent in Mitchell’s original work. Unfortunately, this is the downfall of the novel. Those who read this novel are almost forced to read Gone with the Wind first so they have the full context of the story; this book functions as somewhat of a sequel. Cynara, the heroine, is the child of Planter (Gerald) and Mammy. Whether Mitchell’s Gerald would have wanted to sleep with Mammy or not, I don’t know. In my head, Mammy would never have let that occur… but most in her situation would feel they had no choice. Those two questions completely aside, Lady (Ellen) would never have let that child into her chambers with her or let her drink from her breast. R. (Rhett) really gets the short end of the stick in this work, he is a sad, lonely man who proposes marriage to Cynara and she leaves him, not without plenty of reason. Even Mammy is not even entirely the same in both works. Though this is such a minute detail, as someone intimately familiar with Gone with the Wind, it was easy to catch. Randall, the author, describes Mammy as the cook at Tata (Tara). She was not. That was a separate role on the plantation. There are also many insinuations throughout the novel that Mammy and Garlic (Pork) connived to make themselves rulers of the plantation in all but name by being so influential in the decision making of Planter and Lady. Additionally, it promotes the notion that Mammy and Garlic (Pork) killed the three sons of Planter and Lady so they wouldn’t have anyone who could take their power on the plantation. These two elements, to me, move way past literary or historical reality in relation to its source text and what I am aware of the historical record of the time.
What is so very unfortunate about this book is that the writing is fairly poetic and well-done, and the female protagonist and limited number of secondary characters who are not brain children of Margaret Mitchell are interesting and kept me reading. The fatal flaw of this novel is that it tries too hard to add to a story it has no business touching. Gone with the Wind is the story that it is; those characters of Mitchell’s are who and what they are. This story would be much more powerful and function as a greater advocate for literary representation of historically marginalized voices by being wholly original and simply inspired by characters of Mitchell’s, not attempting to repaint Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with a frown.
Though my formal review is done, I can’t go without decrying the death of Other (Scarlett) in this novel. Like, what?! Yes, let’s kill one of the greatest characters in American literature by making her drunk and having her fall down the stairs of her childhood home. Ugh!”
Diverse representationMultilayeredUnforgettable protagonistClever plottingNonlinear narrativeTwistyWell-structuredAtmosphericEvocative imageryHistoricalOpulentSetting fits the storyBeautifully-writtenEasy to readTakes getting used toAbuseChild abuseDeathDomestic violenceExplicit sexual contentFat phobiaMisogynyRacismSexual assaultViolenceWar violence
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