Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy by Helen Fielding
Vintage (paperback), 2013
388 Pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Jones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Jones:_Mad_About_the_Boy#Bridget_Jones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Fielding#Bridget_Jones
BLURB FROM THE COVER
IS IT MORALLY WRONG to have a blow-dry when one of your children had head lice?
IS TECHNOLOGY now the fifth element? Or is that wood?
IS SLEEPING WITH SOMEONE after 2 dates and 6 weeks of texting the same as getting married after 2 meetings and 6 months of letter writing in Jane Austen’s day?
Pondering these, and other modern dilemmas, Bridget Jones stumbles through the challenges of single-motherhood, tweeting, texting and rediscovering her sexuality in what SOME people rudely and outdatedly call ‘middle age’.
EXTRACT
Thursday 18 April 2013
2:30pm. Talitha just called, talking in that urgent, ‘let’s-be-discreet-but-wildly-overdramatic’ voice she always has. ‘Darling, I just want to let you know that it is my sixtieth on the 24th of May. I’m not SAYING it’s my sixtieth, obviously. And keep quiet because I’m not asking everyone. I just wanted you to keep the date free’.
REVIEW
Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones The Edge Of Reason were my secret indulgences in my twenties. I have both films on DVD and have watched them many times. I had to read Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy to see what she was up to. I thought Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy was great. Bridget is very different in some ways and yet still the same. 18 years have passed since Bridget and Mark Darcy got their happy ending in The Edge Of Reason. Bridget is now past 50,a widow and a mother two young children. She’s still as clueless as she was in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Some moments in Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy made me laugh out loud. I loved it when Bridget first joined Twitter and had no idea what she was doing, obsessively checking her followers every twenty minutes. I thought it was hilarious when she tweeted about being the grand leader and welcoming people to her cult only to obsesses when several followers left. There were also some funny moments around her children and the general craziness in her house and she grapples with early morning chaos of getting two young children fed and dressed so the nanny can drop them off at school. Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy also had some sad moments. Mark has been dead at this point for four years. Bridget has never been with anyone else and feels this would be cheating on Mark. There are some real tear-jerking moments as she struggles with being a widow and controlling her grief. There are some sad moments involving her children as well. Billy wants his dad. Mabel was a baby when Mark died and has no real memory of him. I thought Bridget’s relationship with toy-boy Roxy McDuff (don’t you just love that name) was sad and funny at the same time. It was funny when the kids almost burst into the bedroom while Bridget and Roxy are having sex. It was sad when Bridget missed Mark and realised Roxy was just a fling going nowhere. Overall, Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy was the perfect mix of comedy and tragedy. I thought it was great.
RATING
