Review: Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding

Bridget Jones is back! She's 51 years old, a widow and well ... Bridget Jones. In other words, we've got a total rehashing of basically the same jokes that were repeated over and over again in the first two novels. Bridget is a good person, though she has ideas a little above her station and can be somewhat hapless in her attempts to navigate through her day-to-day life. What Bridget wants is the perfect British upper middle class existence. What she gets is reminder after reminder that it is more important to find personal happiness and to learn through her mistakes. And you know, the book has some truly awesome moments. (Bridget being stuck up a tree and accidentally flashing her g-string at her son's teacher, for example. Oh, and did I mention farting?) But on the whole, the book is just more of the same material that we saw in the first two novels, just tweaked a little to suit the 21st century. (The first two novels being set in 1996 and 1997, respectively.)

I suspect without the sequels, the original Bridget Jones's Diary (which did, after all, inspire an entire genre of rip-offs, in fact my own novel has been compared favourably to Bridget Jones,) would have been destined to become a modern classic, or at least be well remembered for one, it's take on the times and two, the intentional similarities between the book and Pride and Prejudice. But now ... maybe I'm just looking at it from the jaundiced eye of a reader who loved the first book (a common affliction for readers who build their favourite novels into something greater than it is, and then have almost impossible standards for a sequel,) but it just felt like a rehashing of the first two novels ...

Comments

shelleyrae @ book'd out said…
I wonder if they will make a movie out of this one too.?

Shelleyrae @ Book'd Out
22 October 2013 at 21:16
Kathryn White said…
I've been wondering that, too.
22 October 2013 at 21:29
Unknown said…
I guess, when you run out of money after writing two bestsellers, you go back to what you know works and try again.
22 October 2013 at 22:10
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