sailsgoboom 's review for:

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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It took half a year of stopping and starting, but now at the end I don't feel I have a rating for it. I was repeatedly struck by how very real so much of it felt, in a way that "history" rarely is to me, that I could look down Peachtree Street today and see in its place how it looked during Scarlett's time, half-expecting to see the characters trotting down the muddy roads in a carriage -- but I also don't think anyone should ever read this book. I learned so much while drawn into the very vivid lives and minds of these characters, but I was also thoroughly repulsed enough to abandon it for other books several times over. I was swept away, enchanted, put through the emotional wringer, but I'm very glad to be done with it. It's both an admirable accomplishment of a book and a stain on humanity (or at least representative of this).