Ruth's Journey

Don unfortunately does not have the capacity to do justice to this story, and the resulting book is a bit of a mess in my opinion. The writing doesn't flow that smoothly in either the first part (the history of Solange, Scarlett's maternal grandmother) or the second part (narrated by Ruth in dialect. Both are confusing and I found the book difficult to follow.I found the pacing poor in that the writer seemed to concentrate on certain parts of the story (particularly Solange's story) in great detail but then skip over large parts. I wanted to know more about Ellen but that seemed a bit beyond him.
The characters come across as being rather one dimensional and despite the sheer amount of tragedy the book encompasses it is curiously unemotional - deaths just sort of happen and are skipped over without much of a pause, inconvenient characters suddenly die and Ruth pops up all over America meeting everyone vaguely connected to GWTW (the Butler family do not need to be in it just to explain her taking a dislike to Rhett, as far as Mammy in GWTW is concerned, if she dislikes him it's because she knows he's got a bad reputation and a habit of leading Scarlett astray, I don't think we need a big back story about how his father killed her husband).Don certainly doesn't get inside anyone's head either. Ruth loses pretty much all the people that she loves in tragic ways but just sort of gets over it. I understand that as a slave she wouldn't have had much of an opportunity to grieve but give the reader something to work with.
Finally, I don't think it works particularly well as a spin-off from GWTW. I didn't mind Rhett Butler's People but I don't think that many of the characters in this book behave in the way that either I imagined them to or how the society of the time would have let them behave - as far as Scarlett dressing up as a boy riding all over the countryside is concerned, I think she would have either ended up assaulted or have developed such a reputation that no-one would have gone near her and all that stuff about Ashley just staying inside reading was a bit out of character too - part of the reason he is so admired by society in GWTW is that he's clever and accomplished at all the manly pursuits like hunting and riding. He can be a bit wet in GWTW but I don't think the Scarlett of Ruth's Journey would have looked twice at the wet blanket that is the Ashley of Ruth's Journey. Anyway, this would have been a good idea but it is disappointingly executed.