Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

HELEN FIELDING

Synopsis from back cover: Fourteen years after landing Mark Darcy, Bridget Jones's life has taken her places she never expected. But despite the new challenges of single parenting, online dating, wildly morphing dress sizes, and baffingly complex remote controls, she is the same irrepressible and endearing soul we all remember – though her talent for embarrassing herself in hilarious ways has become dangerously amplified now that she has 752 Twitter followers. As Bridget navigates head lice epidemics, school-picnic humiliations, and cross-generational sex, she learns that life isn't over when you start needing reading gasses – and why one should never, ever text while drunk.

Studded with witty observations about the perils and absurdities of our times, Mad About the Boy is both outrageously comic and genuinely moving. As we watch her dealing with heartbreaking loss and rediscovering love and joy, Bridget invites us to fall for her all over again.

Stats for my copy: Trade paperback, Vintage Books, 2014.

How acquired: Book Mooch.

My thoughts: About 30 pages into this book, I was already thinking about moving on to something else. I was just really put off at first by the choppy diary entry style narrative. Although I don't remember that bothering me at all when I read the first two books some ten or twelve years ago. My first impression of Bridget in this book was that while I had grown and matured since the first two books, she had not.

I did persevere, however, and in the end I enjoyed it well enough. Once Bridget met Roxster, I became much more invested in the story, as he was a great character (aside from his ridiculous name) and I really really liked him, And while I'm not particularly a fan of older woman/younger man stories, I really liked them together. Of course it can't all be smooth sailing for Bridget, and I often winced for her and the situations she found herself in. Her kids were cute, though sometimes I wasn't sure if they were really written age appropriately. But then, it's been awhile since my kids were that age, and I'm never around young kids these days, so who knows. All of Bridget's friends from the previous books are still around, but none really stood out, except Daniel, who was just as I remembered him and made me laugh. And of course there were new characters. Bridget's run ins with Mr. Wallacker, one of her son's teachers, were increasingly funny, and I found myself intrigued by him and liking him more and more.

Halfway through I began feeling very nostalgic for the movies, and since the first one was available for streaming on Netflix I watched it one evening and quite enjoyed revisiting it. The second movie is only on DVD (well, I think it was available on Amazon but I'm not willing to pay extra to watch it), so I added it my Netflix queue and am expecting it to arrive tomorrow, and am looking forward to it.

In the end, I was pleased with how it all turned out for Bridget and her kids, but the journey to that point was sometimes a little tedious and exasperating.

One last note – I read the author's Acknowledgments in the back of the book, and I thought it was interesting that she thanked, among several other names, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, but not Renee Zellweger, and I can't help but wonder if there's some story behind that.