Book Review: Ruth's Journey: the Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind by Daniel McCaig

Ruth's Journey: the Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind by Daniel McCaig

Published by: Atria Books

Published on: October 14, 2014

Page Count: 384

Genre: Historical fiction

My Reading Format: ARC ebook for Kindle provided by NetGalley

Available Formats: Hardcover, Kindle ebook, Audible book

My Review:

This is the life story of Ruth, better known as Mammy, in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. We are first introduced to Ruth when she is a small child in Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti) during the unrest of the 1820s. Ruth is owned by Solange Escarlette Fornier, the wife of a weathly planter and army captain named Augustin. Like her granddaughter Scarlett is described, Solange is not beautiful but is green-eyed and striking. She longs for the exciting life she left behind in Normandy. Ruth comes into Solange's possession and is an agreeable and self-sufficient child. The three leave for Savannah and Augustin joins the American army. Soon they are immersed in the social life of this busy, diverse city, and Solange is determined to improve the family's social status. 


I liked all the similarities between Solange and Scarlett. It was fun to get to know Scarlett's grandmother and much more about her past. I liked learning about Ruth's life outside of her time with the three generations of Scarlett's family. Getting a window in on her own personal journeys and heartaches was interesting and made her a more well-rounded character to me across both novels. I also particularly liked getting the back story on on how Scarlett's parents, Gerald and Ellen end up together. 

The narrative point of view changes mid-way through the novel. It begins in the third person, giving us an objective perspective on Solange, Augustin and Ruth. However, Ruth becomes first person narrator later in the book. I enjoyed the well-written, authentic voice of Ruth as an adult and all her opinions on the bustling O'Hara household. I wish McCaig would have told the story in Ruth's voice all along. I think I would have enjoyed Ruth's childlike observations of Solange and the events of her life. The first part of the book would have seemed more personal, and readers would feel, I think, closer to her innermost thoughts and feelings by hearing them from her first-hand. The two points of view are a little jarring. Ruth's first person account is authentic while the third person feels aloof and removed from the action. However, the first time Ruth sounds like the Mammy from Gone With the Wind is more than halfway through the novel. I wish she would have found her voice earlier. 

Also, this isn't just the story of Mammy. Much of the book turns away from Mammy in favor of Solange, enough to make me wonder when we were going to get back on track. In fact, Ruth disappears from the story for a time and we know not as much as I'd like to about where she is and what she's doing. It's during this time that Solange takes center stage. When Ruth comes back, her dialect is different, perhaps because she is an older, more self-assured woman, but it was hard to make sense of.

Don't go into this with false expectations, but do enjoy it for its perspective from one of the novel's most powerful characters. Authorized or not, Gone With the Wind is a tough act to follow. I'm not sure any writer, no matter how talented, will ever be able to write the perfect sequel or prequel to this book. That said, I liked some parts of McCaig's book, while other parts of it didn't quite come together.

Two and a half stars out of five

If you liked this book, you’ll like Rhett Butler's People by Daniel McCaig and (obviously!) Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

South of Broad by Pat Conroy

Last night I didn’t go to bed until I had finished Pat Conroy’s South of Broad. I think Conroy is a fantastic writer, and I think I enjoyed South of Broad even more because I’m only about four months out from having finished Beach Music, and it is still pretty fresh in my head. I’ve read a LOT of books, but I feel comfortable going out on a limb to say that Beach Music is one of the best I’ve ever read. As in top five for sure.

I enjoyed South of Broad almost as much. Both books and The Prince of Tides (the only other Conroy novel I’ve read so far) all have a lot in common: South Carolina, racial and class divisions, mental illness, family (those functioning well and those not), old friends, high school, and honor. I found South of Broad to have many of the things going on in it that were in Beach Music, but it wasn’t so much that I had to put the book down from time to time for a break from it. I had to do that a few times with Beach Music. There is a lot of heavy subject material in that book.

I think part of the reason I liked South of Broad so much is because I love Charleston. I’ve been lucky enough to visit a lot in the past 10 years or so, and it’s a wonderful place to spend some time. I love the harbor, the food, the market, Folly Beach and Isle of Palms, and I love looking out from the Battery and seeing Fort Sumter. So while I read South of Broad, I could pull up mental images of The Citadel and the College of Charleston, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, and King Street.

This was the first time I’ve ever read an account of Hurricane Hugo that wasn’t in a newspaper or online. This massive monster of a storm showed up with only 60 pages to go in South of Broad. I was in fifth grade when Hugo hit and I remember it. I’m a North Carolina native, and I can remember most of the hurricanes that have hit North Carolina during my lifetime. Though my family and I didn’t take a direct hit by Hugo in 1989, my extended family members in South Carolina did.

I wrote my graduate school thesis about my great-grandmother. One of my favorite stories about her was what she did the night Hurricane Hugo came through her town, Sumter, SC. I told that story to show what kind of a person my great-grandmother was right from the get-go in Chapter One. (If you want to read it in its entirety, Google “Betsy Rhame” and “Sumter.” Pull up the PDF and see page 12.). The Washington Post wrote that “Hugo’s eye was described as very large, at 40 miles wide, and hurricane-force winds extended as far as 140 miles from it. Tropical storm winds of about 50 to 60 miles per hour reached 250 miles from the eye.” Sumter is home to Shaw Air Force Base, where they clocked wind speeds the night of Hugo at 109 miles per hour. People in Sumter still talk about what it was like the night Hugo came through in much the same way that I can recall everything that happened the nights of Fran and Floyd in Raleigh, NC.

I’ve been doing a thorough cleaning of my home office and last week came across several undergraduate English papers that I had gotten back from my professors. On one of them, my professor wrote, “I think readers who continually see connections between what they read and what they have lived are the readers who get the most satisfaction and pleasure from reading. Welcome to the club.”

Really, that’s what this blog is all about. It gives me great pleasure to read a Faulkner novel and then visit his home, to remember what stage of life I was in when I first read a particular novel, and to read a Conroy novel and know all the places he’s talking about.

Thomas Wolfe and Pat Conroy

Much of the time I make my reading coincide with travel I’ll be doing or that I’m just back from, and movies or books about to be released. I read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice immediately after my return from Italy a few years ago. I read Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor on my trip to Savannah earlier this year and just before a trip to her farm, Andalusia. Recently, I read Devil in the White City during my trip to Chicago.

However, I’ve just recently enjoyed a serendipitous combination of two writers, a trip and a book release. It has all fit so nicely together and I didn’t even plan it!

I read Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides two summers ago. When I began hearing buzz about his latest novel, South of Broad (I’ve read numerous reviews of South of Broad and two of the magazines I subscribe to, Garden & Gun and Southern Living, have also promoted the highly anticipated novel.), I promptly got on the waiting list for it at the library (I’m currently number 142 in line – it will be a while) and started reading Beach Music which as it turns out, is the most perfectly crafted novel that I can remember reading in a very long time. Beach Music is 800 pages long. Even though I read all the time, it took me a few weeks to get through it. I was about a third of the way through when I camped over Labor Day weekend near Asheville, N.C., hometown of Thomas Wolfe. All of it fit together so nicely, and I was pleased to know that Thomas Wolfe is one of Conroy’s favorite writers. Even Jack McCall, the main character in Beach Music sings Wolfe’s praises when he says,

“Taking out Look Homeward, Angel, I read the magnificent first page and remembered when I had been a sixteen-year-old boy and those same words had set me ablaze with the sheer inhuman beauty of language as a cry for mercy, incantation, and a great river roaring through the darkness. ‘Hello, Eugene. Hello, Ben Gant,’ I said quietly, for I knew these characters as well as I knew anyone in the world. Literature was where the world made sense to me.”

I read Look Homeward, Angel about 10 years ago, but it was as though I had just read it before visiting the Old Kentucky Home, the Asheville boarding house where Tom, the youngest of eight children, was raised by his mother, Julia, a businesswoman far ahead of her time. Scenes that I remembered reading in Look Homeward, Angel came to life for me during the tour of the 29-room house (all but just a handful were bedrooms for the boarders). The tour guide did a wonderful job of telling all about Tom’s childhood there (he based much of Look Homeward, Angel on growing up in the boarding house and his college years at the University of North Carolina). The tour guide balanced stories of Tom and his family with tidbits about what life was like in a Southern boardinghouse. It was really fascinating. Photos inside were permitted, so I took full advantage both there and outside the house.

52 North Market Street, Asheville

A pair of Tom's shoes have been bronzed and are between the house and the street.

Tom's favorite place to sleep at the Old Kentucky Home, the upstairs sleeping porch.

The bed where Tom and his seven brothers and sisters were all born to Julia.

The dining room, which was heavily damaged in a fire in 1998.


I bought another of Wolfe’s famous novels, You Can’t Go Home Again, in the gift shop. I’m looking forward to reading it just as much as I’m looking forward to getting my turn with a copy of South of Broad from the library (if I bought every book I wanted to read, I’d be more than broke). I’m particularly excited to read it as Charleston, S.C. is one of my favorite places in the whole world. Here is a picture taken by me from a boat in the Charleston Harbor a few summers ago.