Rating: 
Summary: A parasite of a parody!
Review: NOTE: MY TOPIC IS ABOUT THE WIND DONE GONE AND NOT SLAVERY(which I hate)!
Not liking the negro portrayal in GONE WITH THE WIND,Alice Randall therefore created her own version, a parody of the acclaimed southern classic.Therein lies the problem.
The trouble with parodies,it so intertwind with the original that it can be used as a sequel,a retelling or a new story with characters copied from the original but this time superior while degrading the original.So much so,readers begin to accept these false truth as the true truth.Not openly but in disguise, words like "what if" & "perhaps".Why?Because people always like scandals to famous chracters fiction or not.When that happen, a novel,even w/ the purest intent and purpose,gets butchered.
Here are some cases to prove my point & where the book failed:
1.THE PARODY/CONCEPT ITSELF-The whole purpose of this book is to show negroes aren't dumb and capable.If you read GWTW,as others call it"White-washed"&"Romantized",is in fact a love story.Plus Mitchell was trying to show how a civilization changes after a war,what better way to illustrate it than the old south?
But why portray negroes like that?
Obviously these fools didn't see Aunt Pitty,Hugh Elsing or Ashley.Aren't they white,helpless,pathetic and idiots?
If you read GWTW, What about the courageousness&modesty of Pork,The industriousness
&loyalty of Dilcey?What about Uncle Peter who single handly raised Charles&Melanie,who looked after and Protected Aunt Pitty?What about Rhett and Scarlett declaring Mammy as a smart old soul?Aren't these persons Negro and admirable traits?
2.MAMMY KILLING THE 3 SONS-In p.663 GWTW, a yankee tells Scarlett "do you think i can trust my babies to a negro?" She thought otherwise,and now Mammy kills Gerald's sons.Its thesame as saying negroes can't be trusted and they kill white babies and Randall was trying to show Negroes in a different light.This damages her&the book's credibility.Noble as her intent,but no good can come out of evil means.Its better to kill 10 people than 1 baby,as the saying goes.
3.GERALD/MAMMY-Check the background story of Ellen/Gerald.There can be no doubt of his fidelity.It takes a great deal of emotion for a person to get unhinged after a loved one's death.
4.CYNARA-She is an exact copy of Scarlett even their ages are thesame but this time she smart,beautiful,brown,a good mother compared to Scarlett.She even has Scarlett's strength & Rhett even prefers her.Ridiculous!if Rhett likers her than Scarlett he would've married her instead,or divorce scarlett after he have is way with her,Rhett boast of being ill-bred so his rep. wont matter.Why this nonesense of mistress and after death marriage?
The book,despite being well-written,feels like a parasite after reading created by a first-time author who wants instant fame,fortune making others accept and embrace that her work is better while destroying others hard work. If you want a book about the attrocities of slavery then buy UNCLE TOM's CABIN which is BETTER than this one.
NOTE: MY TOPIC IS ABOUT THE WIND DONE GONE AND NOT SLAVERY(which I hate)!
Rating: 
Summary: Surptised it took so long for this to come out...
Review: Oh dear. The book that the Margaret Mitchell Estate wanted to ban. Why? Because, rather than seeing it as a parody, which Houghton-Mifflin's attorneys claimed, they said that Alice Randall's work was a sequel. Really? Well, no not really. For aficionados of Margaret Mitchell's only major novel, it's easy to spot who's who in this thought-provoking companion. There's `Other', `R.', `Mealy Mouth' and `Dreamy Gentleman'. But the star of this show is Cynara, the mixed race half-sister of Scarlett O'Hara. Alice Randall, an African-American whose ancestors include a Confederate calvaryman, was keen to address the heritage of mixed race Americans, so frequently ignored. Additionally, wanting to explode myths which have gone into the collective must have spurred her on to script this excellent first novel. So while we never see a shade of `Scarlett,' we know she's there. We also know that `Other' shuns reading, give or take the odd invoice, whereas Cynara uses the written word to understand the world into which she has been born. It's a powerful moment when she tells us of how she read that she was owned. A very different kind of bill! AR goes behind the original characters, exposing their ulterior motives. Why is `Dreamy Gentleman' so damned passionless when confronted by `Other'? And were the slaves really that scatty, or was it just a ploy to better their meagre lots? The cover of this book included the words `unauthorized,' and it was to my great pleasure that I read it over two days, in a Santa Monica library. Because we certainly can't buy it in our shops.
Rating: 
Summary: Ooops! I forgot to write a story!
Review: Alice Randall's original concept for "The Wind Done Gone" was for it to be a parody of "Gone with the Wind" in the style of "Shamela." I haven't read "Shamela" (or "Pamela," which it is based on), but from what I have gathered, "Pamela" is a story about a virtuous woman who scorns her employer's advances, while in "Shamela," this woman is turned into a whore who was playing her employer all along.
If Randall was trying to make a story like that, then she succeeded. If "Gone with the Wind" was a world of strong, intelligent, good white Southerners and their stupid but kind-hearted black slaves; then "The Wind Done Gone" is a novel where those white people are shown to be morons and fools who understand little and are really controlled by those they thought they ruled (unless they're gay, like "Dreamy Gentleman" and "Beauty" - then they're nice people). In this sense, "The Wind Done Gone" succeeds.
Unfortunately, Randall was so busy ripping down the characters of "Gone with the Wind" that she forgot to create her own. I totally agree that Cynara/Cinnamon/Cindy is a Mary Sue. Unfortunately, she's not a very interesting one. She spends most of the story whining and moping about how she is so beautiful yet no one will ever accept her because she is black and she can't believe her parents betrayed her and on and on and on... The only time she does anything is when she leaves R. and enters into an improbable menage-a-trois with a black Congressman and a black woman who reminds her of Mealy Mouth (Melanie). By that time, I could care less.
With a boring heroine (and that's particuarly insulting, considering what a complex heroine Scarlett O'Hara was) and a story that goes nowhere, this book doesn't have much. I didn't buy that any of the characters of "Gone with the Wind" would act as they did in this book. The idea of Scarlett taking blame for something Cynara did, Melanie killing a slave out of anger, or Gerald having sex with Mammy is preposterous. However, if Randall had managed to make an interesting story, I would have forgiven it. Unfortunately, she didn't. The only character who really benefited from any revision was Lady (Ellen O'Hara) but the revelation that she had black blood seemed to only make an unclear point. This book is good as a curiosity, and nothing more.
Rating:
Summary: short and sweet
Review: I thought TWDG was a beautiful novel, just to put it in simple tremes...
Rating:
Summary: Why this story just doesn't work...
Review: TWDG touts itself as an unauthorized parody of GWTW. It is actually extremely poor Mary Sue GWTW fan fiction. It's obvious to anyone Ms. Randall wrote this story as a vehicle to accomplish two things. The first is to indulge in a fantasy love affair with Rhett Butler through written fiction, and the second is to ridicule a wonderful classic novel in any way she could.
"Fan fiction" is a term referring to fiction works where an author uses characters and locations created/copyrighted by another author. Although Ms. Randall renames the characters and presents them in an often unrealistic and unflattering light it's obvious enough the GWTW characters are there. "Mary Sue" is a technique where an author inserts him/herself into a preexisting fiction world and proceeds to change or "improve" the scenario as s/he sees fit.
"Mary Sue" is always exceptional and superior to the "mainstream" characters in the story. More beautiful, smarter, sexier, more intelligent, more successful, more everything than the others. "Mary Sue" is generally truly good at heart and wishes to help the people around her and her "mission" in the story usually brings the other characters "into the light" before she moves on, dies, or happily marries the leading man in the story.
That's not to say Mary Sue work is always badly written and cannot be enjoyable, because it can be. TWDG doesn't work because of Ms. Randall's violent and excessive departures from the "cannon work" (Margaret Mitchell's GWTW.)
Several individuals have praised Randall for "bringing forth the truth about Tara and presenting the more sordid details of what life was REALLY like there." This usually refers to the frequent sexual miscegenation presented in her story. The trouble with this scenario is that, not only is it not "cannon" to the original novel, it is not presented in a credible fashion. The "cannon" states that Scarlett had never seen a mulatto before traveling to Atlanta. That is the reality of the original world set down in Mitchell's story. Now, without any real explanation or series of events to explain why, we are expected to believe that Scarlett had a mulatto sister and playmate raised on the plantation with her, a girl who resembled her physically (of course, she was even more beautiful than her "white" half-sister, although later on we are expected to believe Scarlett herself has African heritage as well.)
When Ms. Randall also expects us to believe that her Mary Sue is the love child of Gerald O'Hara and Mammy...Well, I'm still laughing at that. I don't believe it a bit, but I am laughing about it.
There is an unfortunate number of people who have focused on the racial miscegenation of the Old South even before the War Between the States broke out. The fascination of it in the public eye is almost vulgar and I believe most people love the titillation factor of it. It is almost requisite to believe that every plantation-born male is a rapist (at least the white ones; no one seems curious to know if black planters and slave owners ever sexually abused their slaves which is actually a far more credible crime since most rapists have a tendency to act within their own ethnic groups.) While I don't doubt that miscegenation (both consenting and non-consenting) took place on some plantations and in some cities throughout the country, it's ludicrous to suggest that every planter in the South, black or white, took sexual advantage of his female slaves. What about the planters who might not have found their slaves attractive? What about the true racists who would have considered it degrading to have relations with an "inferior race," and an utter disgrace to father children in such a manner? What about the decent law-abiding citizens out there who knew interracial miscegenation was against the law and chose to obey the law? And finally, what about the men with enough decency and integrity to honor their marriage vows?
If I had been writing this story and I wanted to present miscegenation in a believable light, I would have written Mammy as Ellen's half-sister. If you check out the original novel and read the back story/history of Mammy and Ellen before they moved to Georgia when Ellen married Gerald, there's a good background to suggest that connection in a plausible way. (Another excellent possibility is that Uncle Peter was Miss Pittypat Hamilton's half-brother or half-uncle. Why else would he take it so seriously when his dying master exhorted him, "Take care of your Young Miss Pittypat. She's got no more sense than a hopper-grass.")
Instead we are expected to believe that a middle-aged Irish-American planter (who grew up under British oppression and had some idea of how it felt to be discriminated against himself) devoted to his elegant wife is dallying with said wife's best friend and most trusted assistant (who, in turn, is a child-murderer and master manipulator, more or less "running the show behind the lines." This is hardly an empowering portrayal of a truly loveable and respectable character.) This same planter, presented as being fond of children and foolishly indulgent with his own daughters, effectively ignores and neglects his love child with Mammy (insert more laughter) and even sends her to the auction block.
I'm afraid my overall impression is that Ms. Randall exploited the original novel just to garner notoriety and public interest for her own work and indulge a fantasy where Rhett Butler has a decided preference for mulatto women (more laughter-Butler is one of the most racist characters in GWTW.) The story itself is not badly written, I suppose, but the characters are so misrepresented I just can't warm to it. They are made ridiculous to better glorify the Mary Sue heroine. The book is no credit to a lady of Ms. Randall's education and ability, nor is it a credit to history enthusiasts concerned about exposing the evils of slavery.
Rating:
Summary: No.
Review: Yes, there were many injustices in the south during the Civil War. Yes, slaves were abused, sexually and in many other ways. But here's the thing--Gone With the Wind, racist as it may be, is a beautiful, classic novel. Do I like that I have to turn off the "offense" button when I read it? No--but that hasn't stopped me from reading it more times than I can count. Novels don't have to be real; they're fantasy. I loved GWTW and I will always love it, though I would never want to live it. This book is exploiting the grandeur that was the story of Scarlett O'Hara. It's relevant--but not as a rip-off of the classic. Write it over; create new characters; write your own story of slavery. I would read it with pleasure and recognize how easily it could have happened like that. But, please, don't just take someone's ready-made story and change it around. I love Scarlett and Melanie and Rhett and Ashley and Mammy and Pork. The idea of Mammy killing Ellen's and Gerald's sons is horrifying. Yes, the black characters of GWTW were abused, but they were lovable. At the end of the day, GWTW is a story. It's not meant to be taken as truth. Please, Ms. Randall--write your own story. It's unfair to take one we love so much and tarnish it.
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful First Novel
Review: Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" was immensely popular, and, in its depiction of happy "darkies" devoted to "massa", immensely romanticized. Strangest of all is Mitchell's description of every slave on the plantation as coal black. Thanks to rampant sexual abuse of female slaves by white owners and overseers, slaves came in shade from ebony to ivory, but Mitchell apparently couldn't stomach the reality of miscegenation. In her parody of GWTW, "The Wind Done Gone", Alice Randall brings miscegenation to the reader up close and personal in the form of Cynara, the offspring of Gerald O'Hara ("Planter" in this book) and Mammy, whom Planter was happily dallying with while "Lady" (Ellen O'Hara) decorously pretended not to notice what was going on under her nose. Mammy is forced to give preference to "Other" (Scarlett) over her own child; she gets back at her owners by systematic infanticide of each male child "Lady" brings into the world (readers of GWTW will remember that three infant boys lay in the family graveyard, each bearing the name of Gerald O'Hara, Jr). Cynara is kindly treated by "Lady", oddly enough since "Lady" must know who her father is. Randall brings into her story some other well-known GWTW characters, notably the "Dreamy Gentleman" (who else but Ashley Wilkes), "Mealymouth" Melanie, and "R", Rhett Butler, whose affections Cynara alienates from "Other" and whom she ultimately abandons for one of her own.Randall would have written a much better book if it had been told from the viewpoint of Mammy herself, or any of the other blacks from GWTW, especially one of the hundred unnamed field hands who occupied the lowest place on the totem pole; we might have felt all the indignity of their existence that Mitchell glossed over; we might have learned what it really meant to be a slave at Tara. But Randall was less interested in depth than in broad parody. In this she succeeded, but parody is often shallow by definition, and "The Wind Done Gone" is ultimately a shallow book. GWTW gave a romanticized and unrealistic picture of plantation slavery; "The Wind Done Gone" is equally unconvincing as a critique of the same institution. It's clever and well-written, but when all is said and done, Randall is putting us on rather than enlightening us. Overall, her book is a disappointment.
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