Scarlett O'Hara. I have a hard time saying that "Gone With The Wind" is about the Civil War, although strictly speaking it is. This book is about Scarlett, her imperfections, her mistakes, her life.



"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful." The opening words of this book are shockingly different from the way most romance novels begin today. How many novels have you read that begin by telling you quite bluntly that the woman you are going to be reading about was not beautiful? Not too many.



Scarlett O'Hara is not a good girl, she's no saint, and she's certainly not perfect. I was fascinated by the way she is so essentially different from all of the heroines we read about in today's novels. But somehow her imperfections make her so much more interesting than all of those heroines, who blend into each other and seem to be the same person after a while. Scarlett O'Hara is, I believe, the queen of all "damsels in distress."

Mitchell's writing. Every single word in this book is perfectly placed, so well, in fact, that I was hardly aware that I was reading--it seemed to me that I was being told the story somehow, even seeing it in my head, the descriptions were so vivid and clear.

The end! It's AWFUL!!! I'm going to have to sue the Mitchell estate because of that ending. But I mean it's awful in that it's genius, pure genius, to leave everyone who ever read that book hanging in that CRUEL way! I don't mean that the ending is badly written, I mean that it's the best-written ending to any novel I've ever read! I won't tell what the ending is, because I want YOU to read the book to find out.

Read the sequel, "Scarlett," by Alexandra Ripley. Of course!

I also reccommend the movie, "Gone With The Wind," with Clark Gables as Rhett Buttler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett.

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Created Jun 19, 2003 at 9:58pm • Submit your own review...