Katherine Pinotti

Having waited a number of years to read this book (it was an LibraryThing Early Reviewer book that I won in 2008 but never received), I'm quite glad I waited. I didn't particularly enjoy Gone With the Wind and that may have helped me enjoy this more than I otherwise would have.

I agree with the other comments that the story is not particularly well written, and Scarlet seems to play a manic-depressive for much of the book (I'm a cow, now I'm an airhead, now I'm a super-cow, now I'm an airhead in love). If you take it as a seperate story from the original, then it works in its own right.

The plot follows Scarlet in the year after Gone With The Wind. Her sister is hiding a 'shameful' secret, and is quite ill, so Scarlet sacrifices her own happiness to look after her. Being a novel about Scarlet though, things keep twisting and turning until the very end. The end which, by the way, could have come straight from a 70s romance novel. Blurgh. At least the ending of the original was unique at the time.

Anyways, the story is not overly complex and provides an easy read. As I know absolutely nothing about American history, I wouldn't know if it was in any way accurate, but it had enough descriptive text in there to keep me interested without describing every dollop of mud that she walks through.

All in all, an average read. But I can see it would be below-average if you were expecting something in the exact style of Margaret Mitchell.… (plus d'informations)

This is a terrible book. No review has yet said what a truly awful reading experience reading this clumsy, inept, long-winded (no pun intended) and laughable story actually is. It's not just that the author made the choice to bring back several dead characters from GONE WITH THE WIND to participate in her story... or put certain living characters into situations that never would have happened in 19th century America or Great Britain... and it's not just the third-rate romance novel dialogue that the characters speak... it's also that the plot is so poorly constructed and poorly executed. My mouth fell open on the first capitalization of the word "typhoid", and the author's skills never improved from there. Not unliike Ms. Pinotti's version of Scarlett, I needed a "shot of Brandy" after reading this tripe.

Believe me, I never thought that GONE WITH THE WIND was some untouchable pinnacle of excellence. I was prepared to be generous and honestly thought that the Mitchell Estate was being hard on Ms. Pinotti, getting her book banned in the U.S. But, having gone to the trouble (and considerable expense) to obtain and to read THE WINDS OF TARA -- the Mitchell Estate was right all along.… (plus d'informations)

was sent this book by LibraryThing.

Total rubbish! Repetitive, badly edited, badly written. (For instance if someone is speaking, the dialogue often ends with 'and she rambled on'. The author clearly couldn't think of what the character should say next.) Frequent uses of the same turns of phrase, and I'm only up to Chapter 13, and it's been a plod to get there. Of course, this was a pre-press copy, so the number of typos could almost be ignored at this point, but the level of editing needed to be further down the track.

BUT, I looked it up on the internet, and the reviewer, after revealing pretty much the whole story, as well as the denouement, says:

The typos and errors of this "unedited" book were distracting as were the misspelled character names. All the original characters from the book are here, and are blended well with elements from the movie and the book.

Copies of the book are almost impossible to find, and the author herself was only able to obtain 1 copy. The Stephens Mitchell trust has blocked the publisher "Xlibris" from printing any more copies of the book. Contrary to reports about Borders, Barnes & Noble or any other booksellers taking orders for this book, there are NO copies available and the orders can not be filled. Since this book was printed in such a limited number before being banned, it is a very valuable & rare collectible for the serious GWTW collector. It is estimated that in years to come this book may be as valuable as a true first edition of GWTW, which can sell for upwards of $3,000.… (plus d'informations)