The Wind Done Gone

Rating:
Summary: As Real As It's Gonna' Get
Review: The Wind Done Gone is a brilliant portrayal of how things really were. Randall told the other side of the slavery story that Gone With The Wind failed to mention. Randall did not let southern slave owners off the hook. After reading The Wind Done Gone, no one should walk away feeling content with Gone With The Wind's portrayal of happy, simple slaves and benevolent, kind masters. To tell the story of slavery without violence, rape, whippings, etc., is to do it an injustice.
Blacks were not simple-minded or happy with their lot in life. If anyone were to pick up Frederick Douglass's Autobiography or Down By the Riverside, watch the movie Roots, etc., they would understand and know that life on the plantation was not a zippity-do-da day. Slaves had feelings, hope for freedom, ingenuity; slaves were real people. You cannot tell a story, involve a mammy, and not mention her children and how she was denied the right to mother them. You cannot tell the story of slavery and leave out the dehumanization and stripping of rights. Likewise, you cannot tell the story of the south without slavery. Gone With the Wind, clearly involved slavery, but left out all the more ugly and more brutal facts of this peculiar institution. Alice Randall's account of the South is very real. She just tells her audience what really happened with slavery; while Gone With the Wind tells what white southerners thought happened.
Guess what sport fans?? If you're looking for an accurate depiction of slavery, not a romanticized version, The Wind Done Gone is as close as you're going to get and sometimes the truth hurts.

Rating:
Summary: The Wind Done Gone
Review: Because The Wind Done Gone is a story about the mulatto half-sister of "Other" (Scarlet), Randall still avoids having to confront the true brutalities of slavery in the antebellum South, thus enabling her to write a fiction that is enjoyable for light reading. Because Cynara was still a child of "Planter," she naturally received special treatment that was far better than what the typical slave would have received. It looks more at the experiences that came along with being a mulatto, illegitimate child of a slave owner, rather than offering a new spin on the classic story, Gone With The Wind. It merely uses GWTW as a starting point and base. In respect to the historical accuracy, this novel speaks directly to the mulatto population, rather than to slaves. The experiences of Cynara are far from what many slaves and even most mulatto children experienced. If you want a historical account of a mulatto slave in the antebellum South, read Fredrick Douglass's narrative. I would also tend to agree with the review "Southern Balls" in that to call this merely a parody does it great injustice. This is a fiction that is meant to provoke thought and to shed light on a position that is often over-looked in history.

Rating:
Summary: THRILLED!!! And I am NOT ashamed of it!!!
Review: I am thoroughly and COMPLETELY THRILLED that Alice Randall decided to write this book because (...) I can see the underlying racism that Alice Randall is in essence, trying to get us to see. You see, this novel isn't really about black versus white versus maletto characters in her novel, it's about 'American' society's views on how our past occurred. (...) If slaves cared for their masters so darn much, the 'underground railroad' would have NEVER been constructed (with Harriet Tubman at the forefront of it)!!! In my mind, I think Alice Randall created this novel just to see how much of an up roar white America would cause over this . . . and needless to say, you failed the test miserably. I believe Randalls' account of 'The Wind Done Gone' is a more believable one by far than GWTW, why??? Because of the (...) underlying racist undertones throughout GWTW that made it a depressing and down right degrading read for many African-Americans. (...) Slavery wasn't 'peachy keen' for anyone, and white families weren't as innocent and 'clean' as they were depicted in GWTW . . . wake up America!!! Randalls' just given you a bright and early wake up call, it's time for you (white America) to answer it!!! United we stand indeed . . . this isn't 'reverse discrimination,' how can it be when it's closer to the truth than GWTW will ever be??? (...)

Rating:
Summary: ..rethinking familiar scenes..
Review: Intriguing. I couldn't put the book down. I couldn't put Gone With the Wind down either the first time I read it in 9th grade.
Now, though, I am going back to familiar scenes and rethinking each and every one of them. Alice Randall, thanks!

Rating:
Summary: Do not waste your time!!!
Review: Do not read this book, it is a waste of time! The slaves in GWTW are not potrayed as stupid people. GWTW is about a women living in the South before, during, and after the Civil War. I'm sorry, but there used to be slaves. It is a part of history, and no one can change that. Margaret Mitchell could not change that, so of course she is going to include slaves in a book about the civil war. It is rude of the author of The Wind Done Gone to use the characters from GWTW and turn them into something they're not.

Rating:
Summary: Reader
Review: The first time i read GWTW i was going into 4th grade. I have read it at least 15 times since. I have also read lots of books with connections to GWTW such as Scarlett, so i was so excited when this book came out. While i was reading the book i got so depressed. It was filled with such bitterness, and if u read the biography on the front of the book u will find out that she had two mental breakdowns each one after GWTW book came out and the movie. They turn Scralett into a soft weakling who gives up and Mammy into a cold bloodid killer. I'm not saying u shouldn't read this book, I'm just warning the Die Hard GWTW fans that this is a disgrace to the original.

Rating:
Summary: Disgraceful To Southern Heritage
Review: This book is a total disgrace. I am a teenager raised in the South, who had many ancestors who fought for the Southern Cause. This book is dishonerable towards all the CSA men fought & died for. Im am throughly upset anyone would purchase-much less buy this sorry, shameful excuse for a book. This is merely a book setting a perfect example of reverse descrimination and I am ashamed of anyone who would ever consider reading the trash. GWTW was a beautiful FICTION novel, and this book couldnt have been more disreputable than it is. I hope Ms Randall will come to her senses eventually.

Rating:
Summary: Decent but whiny
Review: While Ms. Randall shows much promise and nerve, this novel comes off as a whining (at times) bore. Cindy is so wrapped up in her jealousy for "other" she makes it her sole purpose in life to one-up "other". Ms. Randall could have really done something had she given the main character more of her own identity, rather than conforming to "other".

Rating:
Summary: Please Sweep it Away!
Review: In short, I'm a Yankee, and would know nothing of the experience of a black or white in the South if I weren't such an avid scholar of the subject. 'Gone With the Wind' has been my favorite NOVEL since I was nine years old. I stress novel because that is exactly what it is. Ms. Mitchell was not writing a work of nonfiction; she was writing a romance of antebellum South. A romantic look at the way things never were. Ms. Randall takes a treasured piece of fiction and turns it around (encroaching on creative rights in the process) into a political piece that would work so much better if she had only thought up her own original characters. In taking Ms. Mitchell's characters, who are extremely three-dementional, yet very charactured, she twists them around into cardboard and creates a storyline that did not exist in the book and never would have. 'Gone With the Wind' is about an American South where slaves loved their owners and owners loved their slaves and there was no strife between then. We know this is not the reality of the situation, but it does no good to turn Ashley into a homosexual or Prissy as a baby-killer than it would for me to rewrite Shylock as a heroic merchant and Jessica as his loyal daughter who fights to uphold his signed contract. Unfortunately, racism is abound in literary fiction and the only way to fight it is to create your own characters who see the light, not forcing someone else's creative matter into conversion by the pen.

Rating:
Summary: THE WIND DONE GONE IS HERE TO STAY.
Review: I READ IT AND LOVED IT. (...)NOW WITH THIS PARODY BY ALICE RANDALL IT IS JUST PUTTING A MIRROR IN THE FACE OF EVERYONE WHO SAW NOTHING WRONG WITH "GONE WITH THE WIND" I'M JUST GLAD "THE WIND DONE GONE" IS NOW GETTING THE LAST LAUGH.