Alexander Ripley's Sequel to Gone With the Wind: Scarlett

OH NO SHE DIDN'T.

This is my review for Scarlett posted on Amazon.com:

Like many avid fans of Gone With the Wind, I sincerely wanted to give Alexander Ripley's sequel, Scarlett, a chance, though I was warned it was merely 'fan fiction' and would make me cringe throughout. There were, to be a fair, a few scenes that I enjoyed and that had me hopeful something exciting may happen, especially Scarlett's dramatic exit out of Charleston when Rhett's sister burns her only note. Yet, again and again, pointless scenes, pointless characters, and pointless conversations filled every chapter, until a long stretch of almost ten chapters with Scarlett in Ireland goes along without hardly a page with Rhett in them. So, when the silly finale and its exhausting dramas finally arrive, I honestly wondered if Rhett's sudden return were not Scarlett's delusion---perhaps she was shot in the street or burned in the big house and the whole ending is her being dead and fulfilling her fantasies! That is how ridiculous the ending seems to me. Why, after rejecting Scarlett so completely at every interaction, should readers believe that suddenly Rhett wants Scarlett back in the mist of a battle? That was my biggest disappointment, as it would be for anyone who can ignore the terrible writing in order to enjoy the romance. In the end, this romance writer even mucked up the romance, the only thing this book had going for it.


The Margret Mitchell Society should never have chosen romance writer Alexander Ripley to write the sequel; Gone With the Wind  may not have been a masterpiece in writing but it had literary merits in that the characters were evenly formed and had clear motivations; a good writer would have been able to pick up from these to write a decent sequel. Ripley seems to have ignored everything about the original characterization and has us believe in caricatures based on silly recycled lines like, "I'll think about that tomorrow", which Scarlett repeats way too many times, being just utterly annoying. 

UGH! 

I left my copy of this book in the  bin down in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was NOT joining my book collection.

Who has read this unfortunate book? What did you think?

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