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[malabar]

Can't follow GWTW up with anything else, really...

Scarlett is an authorised sequel to Gone With the Wind, and first appeared in 1992. Ripley manages to capture Mitchell's style quite well, though it is updated to some degree: black characters mercifully no longer speak in dialect, for instance.

What I enjoy about this book is that it is clearly a sequel to the book rather than the movie. Bit players from the original book are fleshed out in entirely plausible ways, and the detail that Mitchell drew on for her portrayal of Georgia in the first book is matched by Ripley's reconstructions of Charleston, Savannah, and Ireland. The character of Scarlett O'Hara undergoes considerable development, but it all makes sense in the context of the story.


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Quick synopsis: Scarlett chases Rhett to Charleston, fails to reconcile with him, and goes to Savannah. There, she meets with her aunts Eulalie and Pauline at her grandfather Robillard's house. She also drops in on her O'Hara relatives, and finds them much more congenial, to the point where she accompanies two of them back to Ireland for a vacation. While she is there, Rhett divorces her and marries someone else. She then resolves to stay in Ireland, buying back the land that was stolen from the O'Hara family centuries before. While buying horses for her farm, she runs into members of the English aristocracy, hated by her O'Hara relations but whom she finds good company. In time, she becomes one of the most sought-after women in Ireland, and is proposed to by a Count. But she never entirely forgets where she came from...