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With her hotly anticipated third installment, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Fielding introduces us to 51-year-old Bridget Jones, single mother of two children (Mark Darcy having died five years ago). Set in contemporary London, Bridget is negotiating a new phase in her life, including the challenges of maintaining sex appeal as the years roll by, and the nightmares of drunken texting, the skinny jean, the disastrous e-mail cc, total lack of Twitter followers, and TVs that need ninety buttons and three remotes to simply turn on.
An uproariously funny novel of modern life, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a triumphant return of our favorite Everywoman.
"[T]he tone is all wrong. Reading the first two thirds of Mad About the Boy is like listening to someone who once had perfect pitch, but now can't sing a note. It lies as flat on the page as its heroine's overcooked spaghetti. Every line feels full of effort...But that moment occurs in its last third – at 387 pages, it is not short – when a plot twist that was signalled in its section has finally unfurled. At that moment, Mad About the Boy suddenly changes. It is as if Fielding has stopped self-consciously trying to replicate the Bridget of old and allowed her to grow into the woman she really might have been at 51." - The Telegraph
"From time to time, Mad About the Boy drops, or soars, to another level. Bridget's bittersweet days with Mabel and Billy focus an unaffected – and unexpected – tenderness. And when Fielding wants to open the locked box of bereavement, she can: 'Oh the loneliness – the profiles giving away the months or maybe years of heartbreak and disappointment and insult.' Then the kitsch glamour of that posh yacht in Hawaii – or, in Bridget's case, an idyllic Christmas carol concert with a hero much 'like Russell Crowe in Gladiator' – distracts us. Grief and despair fade like a hangover, the consoling fantasy assures us. A new chapter in the fairy tale can begin." - The Independent
"As Bridget floats fragrantly around her son's school concert at a stately home, or wells up at the choir service, all the while having heart-thumping encounters with a masterful teacher, the book starts to seem less like a satire on modern life and more like a good old Jilly Cooper." - The Guardian
"It's fabulous... it's great that Bridget has children – all the original Bridget Jones fans have grown up and we need her to have grown up with us, and there is so much comedy potential around parenthood...And it makes perfect sense for Bridget to be a widow... happy marriage doesn't work in fiction because it doesn't sustain a narrative drive. I'm not interested in reading about Bridget and Mark Darcy arguing over whose responsibility it is to get the car MOT'd… And unhappily married? Do we want an adulterous Bridget? Or a Bridget who self-medicates with chocolate and gin while Mark Darcy is off philandering with someone with whom he doesn't have to discuss MOTs or dishwashers?" - Cathy Rentzenbrink
This information about Mad About the Boy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Helen Fielding was born in an industrial town in the north of England, studied at Oxford University, and went on to work in television at the BBC. Her first novel, Cause Celeb, was based on her experience while filming documentaries in Africa for Comic Relief. Her other books include Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, as well as a book of short stories in aid of Oxfam entitled Ox-tales. She divides her time between London and Los Angeles.
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