Rating  - Outstanding!
Do not believe the negative reviews. I was skeptical after the godfather novels fillin times, but this is the best of this new genre. The characters are true to form and even more interesting. A great novel, long without being boring, great story and exciting to the end. Hopefully we can get another novel of Rhett and Scarlett getting to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th. Get it!
Rating - Rhett's Back and Badder Than Ever!
Rhett Butler's People, a novel by Donald McCaig (St. Martin's Press, $27.95).
Review by Amy Gray Light
It has been seventy-two years since the publication of Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gone With the Wind. Three years later it was made into an award-winning movie, culminating in a grand premiere in Atlanta in 1939 that brought out all of the movie's leading stars. Universally beloved since its publication, GWTW has sold twenty-eight million copies in many languages around the world. Mitchell was working on a sequel when she tragically died, and for these many decades, fans of the novel and movie have long been left to wonder the fate of two of the most famously star-crossed lovers since Romeo and Juliet.
Finally, we need wait no more.
Twelve years in the making, Rhett Butler's People, the sequel to GWTW, made its debut last fall to near-instant acclaim. Fully sanctioned by the Margaret Mitchell estate, Rhett Butler's People reveals what happened to some of the most colorful and well-known characters in fiction, as well as some vivid new ones. McCaig, the New York Times best-selling author of Jacob's Ladder and winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Civil War fiction for the same book, has written his newest novel through Rhett's eyes - Rhett Butler, possibly the most enigmatic and romantic character ever developed on a page. Rightly or wrongly, readers always knew Scarlett's point of view in GWTW. Rhett's motivation, however, remained unknown and his background always remained mysterious to us. Rhett Butler's People unveils his secrets and shares how his character was shaped to make him the renegade he became as an adult.
Beginning with his childhood in South Carolina, we are introduced to his parents, family members, and friends; learning of cruelties that caused him to turn his back on becoming the "proper gentleman" expected of a wealthy Plantation-owner's son. We see how Rhett is more progressive and socially conscious than many of the upper class of that time, and we learn why. We discover how he became such a successful blockade-runner. And we learn the truth of his relationship with Belle Watling, a relationship that shapes and colors the rest of their lives and many of those around them. Finally, we are allowed access into the psyche of this powerful man, which explains how he could become so obsessed with the one woman he could not possess.
Rhett Butler's People isn't just a re-telling of the original GWTW, with a tweak here and there to accommodate the original's plot, however. It has its own explanations of well-known events. This book stands on its own, just as compelling and full of suspense as GWTW. We finally learn what happens to familiar characters, like Ashley after Melanie's death, and Scarlett's younger sisters. But McCaig also introduces us to a set of characters as fleshed-out and full of life as any remembered from the original book. Rhett's sister and brother-in-law, for example, and a freed black man in particular, whose friendship with Rhett leads to one of the most compelling incidents in the novel.
Answering age-old questions that have long concerned fans of GWTW, such as whether or not Rhett and Scarlet ever got back together, where Rhett went after that fateful exit in Atlanta, and whatever happened to Scarlett's beloved Tara, readers will be captivated from the first chapter up to the surprising climax towards the end. McCaig has done a superb job of satisfying GWTW fans' expectations, as well as producing a remarkable book just as wonderfully written as the story it is based upon. This is one book you won't want to put down, and one you'll hate to have come to an end.
-30-
Rating - Thanks to the author for giving us more!!
I personally am a avid GWTW fan and I really liked this book alot. Of course no author will ever equal MM. I picked it up 3 times and started the first chapter and put it down but when I finally got serious and gave it a chance, I ended up loving it! I didn't want it to end because that meant we were left to wait another umpteen years to get another one. I enjoyed reading more about what was going on in Rhett Butler's world while the GWTW story was going on. I have lived in SC all my life and my ancestry is from GA and I can tell you that much of the orginal GWTW and this book are true to what was really going on during that time. I am a genealogist and over and over again am reminded how close MM came to weaving her Jonesboro, GA family stories to her book. This guy odviously did his research and did well to convey SC's history also. With all that said; Give it a chance and enjoy more of the GWTW story. Bless Yall!
Rating  - Love the voices he give his female characters
Entertaining and the person the does the reading on the CD does a good job.
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