Book Review: Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy by Helen Fielding.

  

  RIGHT, CHRISTMAS RESOLUTIONS:

I WILL

- Stop feeling sad and thinking about or attempting to live through men, but think about children and Christmas.

- Have a Christmassy Christmas and make a new start. 

- Be more Buddhist about Christmas. Even though is Christian festival and, by its very nature, therefore, not Buddhist. 

I WILL NOT 

- Order piles of plastic crap from Amazon from 'Santa' but instead encourage Billy and Mabel to choose one or two gifts each from 'Santa' which are meaningful. Perhaps made of wood. 

Join Bridget as she stumbles her way through Christmas and other obstacles of modern life...

As a mini disclaimer, this review is not spoiler free, is quite rambly and long, I am too young to know 95% of the experiences that Bridget does and it probably has a very high amount of spelling errors and general mistakes. I tried!

Oh, Bridget. Funny, chaotic, forgetful, ditzy, the thirty-odd woman living on her own in the 1990's, London, trying to find someone to settle with so she could have what she wants - including children - and in the meantime, her funny and equally chaotic friends are there to fuck up with her. In Mad About The Boy, that charming woman I loved is gone, and instead replaced with a fifty-one year old woman obsessed with herself, trying to turn back the time, getting absorbed in the world of technology and  men, so much so that she often neglects her children and Chloe the babysitter, Daniel the sex addict and even her mother have to come to the rescue. 

I have to say, my expectations were not met up to as soon as I opened up the book. I wanted to know of the relationship between her and Mark was still as loved up as it had been, or if it was a "I've had a long day in work, okay? I just want some rest!", "Oh, you want some rest?!" kind of situation like most modern day families appear to be. Plus, the situations of Shaz, Tom and Jude were very much eagerly anticipated in the book by me, and it was a huge disappointment to know that not just Mark was dead and gone, but my other favorite character Shaz never even appeared in the book! I know friends come and go, but I'd have hoped they would at least kept in touch once in a while. 

I did not understand why Bridget needed to be single in order to create a good and entertaining read. Happy families is, of course, boring but why would she have had to have made their relationship boring? It would have been highly interesting to read a book tackling the topic of married modern day families surviving in the world, very much like they did with the British TV show, Outnumbered (huge fan of, by the way). It would have been a great read to know how Mark and Bridget Darcy were doing as a couple. Heck, Mark could have lost his job, leaving them to support their two young kids, maybe they moved to the countryside and had many chaotic camping trips and hiking adventures - which is typical of Bridget to make such a hectic and impulsive move, only to later regret it.

Instead, Bridget had three (more or less) relationships in the book, which were not quite as satisfying. I did enjoy how this book tackled the world of online dating (fun fact: that's how I met my boyfriend of two years, but not through a dating website, through Skype...oddly, not mentioned in the novel, which is a shame, that would have been interesting, especially with the new sex theme almost absent from the first two books) and ...well, I want to say how hard it must be for a fifty one year old widow with no job and two young kids to be able to find a stable, long lasting relationship would be but, again, it wasn't for Bridget...I mean, how does she even manage it? Leatherjacketman was an entertaining, but pointless, relationship. 

Now, Roxster, despite the unfortunate name choice there, I actually loved. Maybe it's because I'm closer to his age then Bridget was, but I loved the ridiculous amount of sex, the spontaneous, the flirtatious and loose way they spoke in their texting, I wanted them to end up together, even though I know a thirty one year old and a fifty one year old would probably never work out in the end, as much as I wanted it to happen. Instead, she ended up with Scott, a man who was so much like Mark Darcy, it was uncomfortable and it didn't feel natural to me. 

Twitter...very annoying. And repetitive and long and felt more like filler space then actual content that needed to be in there. A brief moment of it, sure, just to sum up how her and Roxster had met but not whole sections. I love social media, I think it's wonderful to escape reality and to be able to still have that needed social contact without leaving the comfort of your bedroom or even wearing clothes. Although I often wondered, what reality did she have to escape? She complained so much about how hectic and hard her life was, but really, she spent most of it texting, on Twitter, or pretending to do her script when really, she wasn't. She didn't even have to wake up early for her kids, she had a nanny, a cleaner and was rich to do whatever she pleased, in a huge house. 

Speaking of the kids, the moments she spent with them (although very few) were heart warming and just made me all the more exited for when I can have my own one day. Especially on Father's Day, when Billy said he wrote a card for his deceased dad. Speaking of heart warming, the parts about Mark and how Bridget was in grief were just...tear jerking, for me. I also really like hearing and saying Mark Darcy. 

Not really sure how she managed to lose three stone in thirteen weeks, either, but it's fiction, anything can happen - especially when she does little to no exercise and spends most of her time eating packets of cheese. 

Assuming Daniel the sex addict is similar age to Bridget, probably older, how is he so popular with young women, especially seeing as his mental health (or physical, for that matter) is clearly not the most stable and he isn't rich, or filled with a charming and lovely personality. I can't deny it wasn't great seeing a friendly face, though. Bridget having a toy boy that involved a lot of sex, too, though, made me think Helen Fielding has a bit of a fantasy she was letting out here. 

I'm pretty glad Tom has settled, Jude finally got rid of Vile Richard, and is getting herself out there to find someone who won't break her heart.

I also felt like Bridget was not the greatest mothers in 3/4 times in this book. She didn't spend very much time with them and often left them in the hands of Chloe, she barely even spoke about them and even ignored texts from their babysitter several times because she was too busy with her toy boy, and it really did seem that she only cared for them at times because they are what's left from Mark Darcy. Boy obsessed! 

I rated this book three out of five stars, because although it was obviously written with a movie in mind, I spent more time looking at how much time the book had left then really appreciating the book in itself (up until the last few pages, that is) and I think I'm going to pretend this book never happened and it ended with the second book, I kinda enjoyed it and I'm not regretting reading it. 

Thanks for reading...if you got this far! 

Book Review: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding

 The wilderness years are over!

But for how long?

Bridget's second diary takes us through a year that begins with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy (who never does the washing up) and lurches onwards through a sea of self-help books and lunatic advice from her mad friends. Struggling with the challenges of a boyfriend-stealing beauty, an eight-foot hole in the wall and a builder obsessed with large reservoir fish, Bridget decides it's time for a spiritual epiphany. And so she departs Notting Hill for the sparkling shores of Thailand...

Bridget is back. V.g. 

A little 'disclaimer' before I get into it, you can skip this section - I realize that reading this book straight after reading the previous one in the series might have been a bad idea (and I'm currently reading the third book in the series, too, and that was an even worse idea) simply because the diary-talk and the writing style and the comedy etc. gets really, really boring and annoying to read. I also forgot entirely that I'm one of those people who just can't read a book right after another book that's too similar, so reading a book by the same writer in the same series falls in that category...which may mean this review is a little off and may need a tinkering with if I decide to read it again in the future. I'm also writing this quite a while after I had actually finished the book. I procrastinate even in my hobbies! 

With that being said, I want to start with the issue about this book that has been bothering me the most, and that's feminism. The whole tone of that topic within both the previous book and this book is mocking and is pretty difficult to take seriously. If is serious, it's a huge misconception on what feminism really is. I have a feeling the mocking tone might have been done just for the sake of humor, and in some cases it worked (barely, but it did). Don't even get me started on Sharon-the-man-hating-feminist. I still love her, I think she's feisty and badass and her rants are funny, but they would have been funny without the man-hating. 

Also, the relationship between her and Mark is very childish from my point of view. They broke up because of Bridget having a misunderstanding about Rebecca, also caused by gossip and bad advice from her friends, and Mark's inability to communicate what he's thinking and being able to fight for something...in real life, there was a pretty high chance Bridget could have been gone forever over a misunderstanding and if he really did love and want her as much as we were told we should believe, why didn't he fight for her. Well, I suppose he did...way way later in the book, and maybe because I'm only an eighteen year old girl, I don't really understand adult relationships and maybe that's why I believe this to be immature. Maybe it was just portrayed badly and it was just trying to show how Mark made her feel like a teenager again, and that's why she was acting like one. I'll try to remember to re-read this when I'm single in my thirties. 

This is just me being kinda picky with the way it's setup, I suppose, but why is she writing in her diary during situations an ordinary person wouldn't even be on their phone in, and how is she writing in it. My memory is bad and it's been a while since I read it, so I can't really give you an example from this copy but there is just a lot of situations where she picks up the diary and writes full paragraphs and I have no idea how. 

Also, the plot line. I have no idea how the book got to be as big as it did. Most of it must have been a filler. The actual excitement didn't happen until much, much later. Even then, it wasn't that exiting, it was also kinda confusing. Did they let her keep her diary and her pen but they took everything else from her, and didn't let her have it until the day afterwards? Why was everyone else in the cell not allowed a bra, but she was? How did they get their hands on cigarettes? I'm sure she did plenty of research about this before she wrote it, I'm just in-educated on how Thailand jail cells work. It's a shame the writer didn't use that as an opportunity to teach people about it. 

Sorry, sorry...this book review has turned into a rant about it, rather than the actual book itself. I did actually enjoy this book, and I would recommend it as a light read just for it's comedy value but I just don't think any of it's filling is outstanding. Thanks for reading!