Gone With the Wind

By Margaret Mitchell
Rating: BRILLIANT
Read: Fall Semester 05 (October… December)

I started college in New York City this semester, which is the reason for the MASSIVE delay in reviews. I’ve come to both love and fear street vendors; I never have cash for gorgeous jewelry, which is ultimately much safer… but then there are the book vendors. I got my very well worn (obviously loved) copy for about two bucks from the guy outside the graduate facility building.

I am eternally grateful to that guy.

It’s beautiful. It’s brilliant. It’s another world that strikes close to home with every page–and at over 1000 pages, that’s a helluva lot of homestriking. I just finished reading and I have that Should Cry feeling. I wish I could, but I think I’m too emotionally drained.

You can’t really call Scarlett O’Hara a heroine or a protagonist. Really, she’s the target of the world’s longest bildungsroman. The novel begins on her home plantation of Tara, and she a tender–but beau-ensnaring girl of 16. She is ruthless and plays all the games, because they’re all she’s been taught to do. Look pretty and get a husband. She has a terrible crush on Ashley Wilkes, a studious and unearthly gentlelad from down the road, but he is bound to marry a distant cousin, Melanie. The nefarious Rhett Butler makes his entrance into Scarlett’s life just in time to catch her at her worst… and hold it against it ever thereafter. On that same day, the Civil War begins, and all the young men of the county- including Ashley- leave for battle.

Nothing is ever the same for Scarlett, or Tara, or even Georgia, again. The supports upon which she has always leant fall away from her singly and in chunks… Her gentle mother, the security of home, the freedom of being a young flirt…

I refuse to give things away. You HAVE to read it for yourself and discover how the spoiled and selfish Scarlett becomes the destitute and selfish Scarlett, then the ruthless and selfish Scarlett… and then?

I certainly give a damn.

We’ve rented the DVD of the movie; I’ll follow up if I have the strength. *swoon*