The Wind Done Gone

The Unauthorized Parody by Alice Randall

Have you heard of this book?
The story of Gone with the Wind, told from the perspective of Scarlett's half sister, the daughter of Mammy?

How is it I haven't heard of this book? Granted I have been buried in my work for the last ten years (gasp!) But there was a lawsuit from the Margaret Mitchell estate trying to keep the book from being published. I should have heard that! And the Oakland Public Library has many many copies of it!

It is soooooooooooooo good!
How good is it?

It is so good that I want to stop reading it right now, for fear that it won't be able to keep on being so good.

because it is.

so good.

I want to stop where I am (only between 1/3 and 1/2 way through) and go back and read it from the start again, because i know how good it is, I just want to savor the knowing.

I know the [white] fans of GWTW hate it. Not because they're racist. Because they're stupid.

If you think I'm being flip, go read the reviews on Amazon, and the absolute HYSTERIA of folks saying what a terrible, terrible thing Randall has done, and how she must be a crazy bitter woman to have written such a thing, and PS "it's not funny!" (Oh, but it is! Because quiet as it's kept, you're the joke!) My favorite reviews are the ones that say "Randall had the chance to show good black people living righteously under horrible conditions, but instead she made them..." And really the word I think they're looking for is "family." not as in "like one of the" but as in, "you know why your mama hates the light-skinned slave children." And that's only the beginning.

No, no really. That's the thing. because this book picks up that globe that we've all learned and shakes it up and down and makes it snow inside.

I see glimmers and hope that what they hint at is true.

don't you?