Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the highly anticipate third instalment of the Bridget Jones series whose author, Helen Fielding, gained a legion of fans the world over with her beloved depiction of the country’s most famous singleton.
Understandably, much hype surrounded the publication of Fielding’s new book, and, when a week prior to its release, The Times published an extract in which fans discovered darling Darcy had died, much furor ensued. Indeed, when critics went on to reprehend parts of the book for being an unrealistic portrayal of the life of a now fifty-one year-old single mother, I was slightly nervous that Mad About the Boy would fail to live up to the expectations I had for it, following the fifteen year absence of one of my favourite literary characters.
The book begins five years after Mark Darcy’s untimely death and Bridget is now a single mother to Mabel and Billy, living in north London and trying desperately to juggle writing a film script with de-licing her children’s hair. Now a non-smoker she has replaced counting fags with twitter followers, though her obsession with calorie counting remains, and is certainly not helped by her love for packs of ready-grated mozzarella.
Having been convinced by high-flying Jude and gay-best-friend Tom to get back on the dating scene, Bridget begins a relationship with 29 year-old Roxster who she meets on Twitter and consequently begins a study into dating etiquette in the 21st century.
Both Bridget’s mother and love-rat Daniel make a number of appearances, and the characters are exactly how I had imagined them fifteen years on from when we left them. While just as hilarious as its predecessors, Mad About the Boy also contains some touching scenes in which Bridget reminisces about her and Mark’s life together and we witness her trying to deal with her won grief, as well as that of both Mabel and Billy.
For me, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was everything I had hoped for and more. Offering an ideal slice of escapism for a rainy October weekend it was the perfect follow-up to Bridget’s first endeavours as a thirty-something singleton. For me, the only downside is that having fallen in love with her all over again, I now fear that it may well be the last we hear from the beloved Bridget.
About Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Bridget Jones is back!
Great comic writers are as rare as hen’s teeth. And Helen is one of a very select band who have created a character of whom the very thought makes you smile. Bridget Jones’ Diary, charting the life of a 30-something singleton in London in the 1990s was a huge international bestseller, published in 40 countries and selling over 15 million copies worldwide. Its sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, published soon after was also a major international bestseller. Both were made into films starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.
Set in the present, the new novel will explore a different phase in Bridget’s life with an entirely new scenario. As Helen Fielding has said: “If people laugh as much reading it as I am while writing it then we’ll all be very happy.”
About Helen Fielding
Helen Fielding was born in Yorkshire. She worked for many years in London as a newspaper and TV journalist, travelling as wildly and as often as possibly to Africa, India and Central America. She is the author of four novels: Cause Celeb, Bridget Jones’ s Diary, Bridget Jones:The Edge of Reason and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, and co-wrote the screenplays for the movie of Bridget Jones’s Diary and the sequel based on The Edge of Reason. She now works full-time as a novelist and screenwriter and lives in London and Los Angeles.
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