Kathy's Reviews > Gone with the Wind

Ugh.

This book is nothing if not tedious; it tries to romanticize an antiquated time, where people were treated as less simply because of the color of their skin, and where women were seen as insipid dolls, whose only value lay in producing offspring and tending a home.

Scarlett is supposed to be our heroine, a woman who bucks societal norm to forge a new life for herself, after losing most of her wealth in the aftermath of the civil war. Unfortunately, she lacks basic compassion and only ever sees value in herself, to the point where I found her almost sociopathic. She is also an unrepentant bigot, not only to the plight of slavery, but also to the treatment of her fellow women.

So how am I supposed to give a damn about her?

Quite frankly, I couldn’t, which is perhaps why I hated this book. Scarlett is vile, but so is the rest of the cast in their own ways; she just happens to be our main point of view, a racist narcissist, which really, sums up the book itself.