Customer Reviews

better than I expected - By: the, 15 Jun 2008
Having watched the film enough times to know the dialogue by heart I thought it might be fun to read the book. Friends who had already read it advised me against it & said it's not such a great book, but I felt too tired & weary to do Thomas Mann justice so I read Gone With the Wind just the same.

Judging from the film I anticipated a wholesome old-fashioned romance & I was feeling like reading something entertaining & not very challenging. The romance element is there, & there are a lot of new details on the life & relations of Scarlett & Rhett as those of Melanie & Ashley. There are various episodes & facts which were left out of the film [for example that Scarlett has children from her previous marriages & Bonnie isn't her only child] & many details of the family life & history of Scarlett. If you love the characters it will be fun to learn more about them.

The writing is decent; Mitchell's style is old-fashioned & not particularly polished but yet comparing it with some contemporary bestsellers [e.g. Bridget Jones] it fares very well indeed.

The welcoming surprise for me was the information on the American civil war. Not being American I had a simple, sketchy image of the civil war & I have never given any thought on Southern feelings or the Southern way of life. This book depicts how southern slave owners & Ku Klux Clan founders were seeing themselves & the changesin their society thus being an interesting -though I am not qualified to judge how accurate- account of American cultural history as well as a romance. Even though that was not what I was expecting from this book an increased interestin American civil war was what I will get out of it. It gives an insight to a society with completely different views, principles & customs.

That said I would not want to put off readers who like me expect a romance, because this is what it essentially is. I just wanted to add that the background is equally interesting.

The edition itself is of very bad quality, pages were easily torn out as I was reading it & ink stained my fingers as if I was reading a newspaper but I don't think there are any better editions of it out there anyway.