Word: scarlett
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Before Alexandra Ripley presents this not-so-astonishing revelation in Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, the author hauls Scarlett from Tara to Atlanta to Charleston to Savannah, finally depositing the nomadic heroine in Ireland for 500 pages before allowing her to recapture Rhett...
...refused to write a sequel. Gone with the Wind is not merely a love story. It encompasses the turmoil of the Civil War, the disastrous impact this conflict had on the lives of honorable and not-so-honorable Southerners, and the story of a thoroughly tantalizing heroine, the implacable Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler...
...Scarlett, Ripley leaves the South behind to explore the conflict between the Irish and the British in the 1870's, as witnessed by a Southern belle with Irish blood. The effect is less than enthralling. Scarlett lived and breathed the South in Gone with the Wind; in Scarlett, she is essentially a spectator in a far less interesting saga...
Ripley tries to update the tone of the novel--she carefully avoids using dialect for her black characters and evades the topic of race relations after the war entirely. In order to do so, Ripley ships Scarlett off to Ireland to discover her roots. Unfortunately, the South which Scarlett leaves has been incorrectly reconstructed by Ripley. The graceful antebellum South which Ripley depicts, full of honor and traditions and social proprieties, was destroyed by the Civil...
Ripley takes many of her characters from the original novel--Mammy, Ashley Wilkes and many others reappear. Their appearances are perfunctory, as Ripley devotes the bulk of her energies to the development of many new characters, most notably the scores of O'Haras that Scarlett meets both in Savannah and in Ireland. Ripley cannot do much with characters like Ashley and Aunt Pittypat; Ashley remains wishy-washy, and Aunt Pittypat still faints...