Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding

Summary from Amazon:

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.

 

My Thoughts:

     I have always loved Bridget so I cannot believe it took me this long to read book #3 in the series!?! She is back and just as hilarious as ever…also just as unorganized and confused as ever! Most of the old clan is still here as well; Tom, Jude, Mrs. Jones, Cosmo & Woney, Jeremy & Magda, etc.  Shazzer is off living in Silicon Valley with her dot com millionaire husband! 

     I think we can all relate to some part of Bridget’s personality and I think that is why she is so loved.  Whether it is her fear of dying alone and being eaten by wild dogs, her worries about her career, her amazing abilities to procrastinate and then panic or her fear of being the worst mother in the history of parenting you’ve been there…at least once! Bridget cannot figure out the multitude of remotes, how to rewrite her screenplay, find something decent to wear, or ever get anywhere on time…who hasn’t had that problem?  Bridget is funny, pathetic, and triumphant and we all hope that we can scramble and bumble through life as she does and still come out happy in the end. 

     If the drunken tweets (twunks!) and the desire to have more Twitter followers don’t stress her out enough there is always something else.  Children to feed and screenplays to rewrite to include yachts and Sweden, plus a possible boy toy are added into the mix just to make things interesting.  I don’t want to spoil anything for those who haven’t read this one yet but Bridg is also dealing with grief and loneliness and many times I was brought to tears. 

Reading these books has always been a bit like talking to a good friend-suffering and laughing right along with her through all the mess that is life!  4/5 stars