Friday, December 12, 2014

Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding

5 Star

With her hotly anticipated third installment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Fielding introduces us to a whole new enticing phase of Bridget's life set in contemporary London, including the challenges of maintaining sex appeal as the years roll by and the nightmare of drunken texting, the skinny jean, the disastrous e-mail cc, total lack of Twitter followers, and TVs that need 90 buttons and three remotes to simply turn on.  

 An uproariously funny novel of modern life, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a triumphant return of our favorite Everywoman.





Kathryn - 5 Star

Oh Bridget how I’ve missed you!  I think I’d resigned myself to Bridget Jones’ having found her man and her living happily ever after in fictional bliss but I am so very pleased she’s come back out of fantasy land to make me laugh again.  Now, you may have heard that there are some things about this installment that are not what you’d like.  But if you’re a fan of the original novels then you’ll be a fan of this one.

Bridget’s voice is exactly the same as it was years ago but she’s now a mother which added, for me, a new connection.  The mad way she approaches the chaos of small children made me laugh so hard I had to share it with my husband (who smiled and nodded at me like he was pacifying a toddler-useless man!).  I related to her complete love for them and utter frustration with them equally. And I think her approach to motherhood would have been the same with her partner present or not. Fielding did not deny the voice of Bridget even with her new circumstances and that says a lot about her writing skills, so many years later.   Bridget, dating at 50ish, with tweeting, Facebook and the errors that ensue is hysterical and still manages to fit into the diary-like format we already love.  Her boyfriend Roxster is lovely- just lovely (insert smiley face here!).

The cast of usual characters are mostly all present- utterly nuts and always supportive friends, including Daniel Cleaver who is apparently allowed to babysit???? 

I had a couple of little tiny issues. Firstly, I wished that her mother wasn’t so flaky.  Although she was always a bit hands off l I found her most frustrating in Mad About The Boy. Given that her daughter could really use some help at this juncture in her life, you’d think she would put aside her own agenda a smidgen and be a bit more of a hands-on grandma, no?  I didn’t care for the way her dating life turns out (but shall say no more) and I also had a bit of a hard time getting to grips with Bridget “the screen-writer”. I liked the idea of her being a writer but she seemed to manage to pull things together without much effort and produce a manuscript despite her masses of distractions.  I’ve been acquainted with a number of writers and I think it actual takes more time and commitment than Bridget seemed to give it.  So that was a bit off for me.  But it added to the madness of her life and Bridget is supposed to make us laugh and touch our hearts so I’ll push those niggles aside. 

At one point towards the middle of the book I sobbed and sobbed and not three pages later I was laughing again.  This is what makes Bridget Jones the ultimate chick lit classic and why we have missed her character so very much.


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