Bridget Jones: Mad About a Boy by Helen Fielding

Amazon Synopsis: Move over, Bridget Jones’s diary: She’s back, and this time she’s texting and tweeting. . .
Fourteen years after landing Mark Darcy, Bridget’s life has taken her places she never expected. But despite the new challenges of single parenting, online dating, wildly morphing dress sizes, and bafflingly 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 glasses—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.

Spain gave me a chance to dig into some books that had been on my TBR pile for a really long time. One was this final instalment of the Bridget Jones Diary series. I wish I had just not bothered.

Bridget is now 51 years old with two children living a lavish life just outside London still keeping up with her journal. The only problem was all favourite characters were written out, those still there were desperate middle aged people, and no one had figured out that there are more important things than weight yet. No exactly relatable to nineteen year old me. All I could think is I really hope my mum does not think like this person.

Bridget seems to have not grown or matured at all since the first book and though I really felt for her at times there was just not enough focus on Bridget as a mother and wife, instead it just followed her around as she craved a boyfriend again. She only wanted popularity on Twitter and to be popular again despite having two kids at home that were being basically raised by a nanny. How she afforded her lifestyle with no job, or how she could complain about not being 110lbs when she still weighs a little less than me at 51 post weight loss is beyond me. She really just annoyed me to the max here.

Humour wise, there were some moments that were funny but in truth it was obvious that this book was struggling by all the fart jokes. Really scraping at the bottom of the barrel with that one. Instead of laughing I just found myself rolling my eyes a lot. Were I in the age group of the characters I probably would have enjoyed it more because I could understand but to me she just was a bit of an idiot for 400 pages.

The plot was predictable and a little boring. I did finish the book in a day by the pool, but only because I had hope that it would pick up a little. Not much else to say there.

If you love Bridget Jones as I did and are not over 50, I recommend that you do not bother picking this final volume up. It was absolutely unnecessary to use the same character for this novel. It could have been a totally new one and would have been better for it.