Helen Fielding - Mad about the Boy

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The trouble with sequels are that they are sequels.  They never have the sheen of the original. They cannot, the original came first and wowed us with the new concept, the mad, wonderful idea.

Bridget Jones, 30, single, overweight, has a tendency to over indulge in cigarettes and liquor.  Being plump, she has a low self esteem in this world where all women have to be well groomed and thin.

She is not the take charge, alpha female.  But she has oodles of charm.  It is something Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver are able to see.

So did millions of readers.  Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones (1996) book became a bestseller and was made into an equally popular movie.  A sequel (1999) followed fast on its heels; 'Bridget Jones: The edge of Reason.'  It wasn't as brilliant as the first book, but it rode on the popularity wave of the first book and was likewise made into a film.

When 'Mad about The Boy' came out in 2013, I waited for the reviews.  They were quite unkind and I gave up on the idea of reading the book.  A few days ago I read this article on the new Bridget Jones movie. It send me racing to amazon to buy  'Mad about The Boy', which I read with expectations duly lowered.

Of course, the latest Bridget Jones cannot beat the original for the very reason I mentioned in the first paragraph.  BJ is still scatterbrained. She can barely take care of her two children. Mark Darcy is out of the picture, dead. Like a good man that he was, like any man that Miss Austen dreamed up, he was a good provider and BJ does not lack money or resources.  She lacks love.

Her good friends, Jude, Tom and Talitha (Shazzer has moved to Los Angeles) try to get her out there. New Bridget Jones is not using intra office messaging now, she is tweeting. She picks up a yummy boyfriend over Twitter.  Roxster is young and toned and oodles of fun.  Just what a newly minted BJ needs. She needs to lose her 'Born-again Virginity', stop obsessing over Mark Darcy and get on with her life.

BJ's sojourn into the world of social media circa the second decade of the new century is hilarious. There are sad moments when she misses Darcy, but being Bridget, she lapses back into being funny soon, so we do not feel too depressed.

The ending seemed a little upper class and tame to me.  Surely she could have done something crazy.

The book was very rollicking at the beginning,  It got a bit tame later, but was still a v.g. yarn.