Free Downloads Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy (Vintage Contemporaries)
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.Look for Helen Fielding’s new book, Bridget Jones’s Baby, coming October 11, 2016.
Series: Vintage Contemporaries
Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 3, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345806344
ISBN-13: 978-0345806345
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1,058 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #14,072 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #29 in Books > Literature & Fiction > British & Irish > Humor & Satire #52 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Satire #194 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Satire
I love Bridget Jones, so much so that I got off work early today just to read this novel I have been waiting for. The novel where I hoped Bridget and Mark finally worked out all the kinks and were having a baby, only to have Daniel come in and mess it all up. I mean come on... third times a charm right? I wanted to be shocked by this whole book so I read none of the clues or hints dropped leading up to the release. But I hated this book and I don't use that word lightly. The book starts off talking about people and things COMPLETELY unfamiliar to me and in a way that looks like a vomiting Twitter feed. Once characters are explained I'm left thinking - why the hell so much later in life? Why am I getting invested in these new characters when the old characters are wilting away with little care? We missed all the good stuff? Where it does pick it it stumbles into things unknown again and then the bomb drops... Fielding killed off one of the most beloved, ESSENTIAL characters of the novel. The death was heartfelt and meaningful I understand, but the other books felt me believing in love, no matter how difficult and meddled., but this book felt me thinking "Well I'll lose the love of my life, but I guess I'll have to move on." This book left my heart sad. I understand Bridget is more grown up and a different woman, but I agree with other reviewers, she lost her heart.
Like most of this long-awaited sequel's audience, I loved the original Bridget Jones books. The fun, funny, foible-filled British heroine's romantic travails were laugh-out-loud, riotous good fun and set a chick lit standard few have, or will likely ever, match. But when we meet Bridget again in MAD ABOUT THE BOY, we find that, despite finally finding true love, before being struck by tragedy, and being blessed by motherhood, she hasn't really changed. At all. And, frankly, at 50+, her antics are more than a little tiresome.I don't think anyone, including myself, wanted Bridget to turn into an uptight supermom who has it all together, but in MAD ABOUT THE BOY, the single, searching Bridget goes from lovable mess to slovenly, sex-crazed single mom, who seemingly relies on her nanny for the bulk of her child care and, through a quickly explained plot device, is suddenly wealthy enough that she doesn't ever need to work, so thus spends the bulk of her life sending embarrassing texts about farting to boys 20+ years her junior. It's not really amusing. More sad.And if I never hear another story about lice (nits) again, it will be too soon.The relationship with her "toy boy," and the endless agonizing over him like a lovesick teen, seemed wildly uninteresting and utterly pointless ... Given how clear it was he was never gonna be her new happy-ever-after. (And, seriously, how ludicrously perfect was he? I kept thinking that particular storyline was developed solely for Ms. Fielding, who also writes is a producer on the movies, to ogle young men she hopes to feature.)And, by the way, Bridget's "real" love interest, whom, I won't specifically spoil, was both painfully obvious (called it the first time he was introduced), and yet also completely out of left field and absolutely tacked on in the final two chapters. I say that because the plot gave them zero reason to even come close to falling in like, let alone love and then threw them not only into bed, but into an apparently lifelong relationship ... All in the final 10 pages. And all the weird James Bond/fabulously wealthy hero bits added to his persona, via a single random conversation, at the end? Absolutely bananas with a believability quotient of negative 100. And even if you buy it all, the fact that Bridget only loves him AFTER she finds out he's a wealthy ex-special forces guy makes her seem even less likable.Two other irrational plot irritants that stuck in my craw ...Doing the math that puts Bridget in her early 50s, which is accurate to the original book's timeline and is explicitly stated here, makes it hard to accept the idea that she's also got a preschooler that would have been born when she was, at the very least, 46. Less than believable. Making her kids 10 and 12 would have allowed for at least as much angst, though hopefully fewer head lice, and been a lot more physically-plausiable, biologically-speaking.Bridget, who has always been (charmingly) bothered by her weight, starts the story seriously heavy, for the first time ever. (Understandably so.) She, of course, loses the weight, and keeps it off. But how? She never exercises. She fails at all of her medical weight loss efforts, by her own accounts, and then continues to eat non-stop, often listing 5,000+ calories in her diary, right alongside her magically low weight.It's like Fielding loved the idea of going back and exploring the weight woes of her character but then just couldn't be bothered with fat Bridget after a time so, voila, she suddenly dropped 50 lbs in 10 pages with zero explanation as to how. Her weight number at the beginning of each diary entry go down-down-down, while her calorie-counts, and hilarious (not really) grated cheese binges stay the same, and her lack of exercise continues to be a point of humor. Umm. Yeah. Nope.My other big issue is that, even as a major Jonsey fan, my familiarity with her inner circle has become fuzzy over the years. Beyond Mark, Daniel and her mom, my memory of her large cadre of friends--who they all are, how they know her, what they do--had waned. But Fielding apparently expects her readers to have done the homework of recently rereading her earlier books, despite a decade-plus publication gap, and does no catch-up or recap, just randomly throwing names I recognize but not what their relationship or position in Bridget's life is/was. I suppose the fact they seem unchanged, and, frankly, fairly one dimensional, means knowing who they are/were doesn't really matter much, but the beings that surround satellite Bridget in BOY get little more than minor mentions and zero personality or resolution to their own storylines, which I know they had in the original series. They exist soley to text Bridget, bring her wine and sign her up for her online dating.I think there could have been a good book in here, even given Fielding's controversial decision on how to eliminate Jones' original happy-ever-after from the picture. Watching Bridget struggle with single motherhood (and appropriately-aged children), grief, weight and even "getting back out there" in a more believable fashion could have made for a fun, funny lark of a story. But making the children little more than sentimental props, and both invoking the tragedy, but then quickly dispensing with it in order to spend the bulk of the book about her sleeping with 20-somethings and learning about Twitter, just seemed like a huge waste.Also, and maybe it's just me, but I'd like to see Bridget grow up a BIT over the past 20 years. Having found true love, both romantically and as a mother, you'd think she'd at least be somewhat more confident and settled, at least in some parts of her persona. Maybe she could even learn that being a singleton isn't the end of the world? In short, don't replace the perfect guy you killed off with another, equally perfect (rich, handsome, infinitely patient and understanding) one just to tie up loose ends. I mean, if that's the only ending you think Bridget deserves, what was the point of killing him off in the first place?The beauty of Bridget is that she had always been "one of us," even though I'm quite a bit younger, was never even slightly on the prowl, even when I first read these stories, and I'm not at all British. Yes, her anecdotes were always absolutely over-the-top and Bridget was always a mess; probably not someone you'd want to deal with in real life but funny on the page. And what made all her neuroses OK was that Bridget was also sweet and relatable. She had a core of truth to balance the outrageousness.But this new Bridget took away the heart of Jones. She was no longer struggling, at anything. Work life stress? Too boring. Let's make her independently wealthy. Watching someone be a mother? It's been done! She's a got a nanny. Problem solved. Physical flaws? Eliminated without actually eliminating any of the supposedly "cute" things that may cause them (laziness, overeating, drinking), because those things are "funny." Magic! (Also magic fertility, apparently.)I just don't know anyone that can relate to a 51-year-old mother of two under seven, who has no need to work, yet still gets to write a movie script that appears to be getting made, eats 5,000 calories (most) days, but magically loses 50 pounds, and has 29-year-old ripped hotties falling at her feet begging her for non-stop sex.I think I would have loathed this book less, had it not been about one of my most beloved characters of all time. But even as just-another-chick-lit book this was far from good. I kept putting it down, and had it not been THE Bridget Jones, I likely wouldn't have finished it at all, ever.
Fielding said Bridget had to be a singleton for this to work. Wrong. Fielding brilliantly navigated the singleton wonders and woes in the previous books. That mine is empty. WHY, oh why, did she feel the need to do a depressing replay of what worked so well two times before?I don't believe women -- in general -- really want younger men. Hard body, undeveloped mind? Not interesting to me. But the biggest shame, to me, is that Fielding didn't bother to challenge herself to actually move Bridget along -- into the challenges, difficulties and rampant boredoms that lap at the shorelines of any long-term relationship. Killing off a character doesn't make this great literature. It makes this book a great bore.When the author killed off Mark (supposedly to show us that life doesn't always have happy endings) she killed off the spark that made Bridget's story work. And, does Fielding really think that her readers thought any of Bridget's story was realistic in the first place? I'll read Tolstoy or Edith Wharton if I want to encounter life's inevitable tragedies. I've had lots of heartache and loss in my own life since I first read Bridget's story and I did NOT need her...or Fielding...to show me that life doesn't always work out the way we want.How much more interesting this book could have been if the author had been willing to consider Bridget and Mark rediscovering each other, or facing some challenge coming from their very different personality styles. Yes. Bridget aged. Well, so have I. And I don't want to read about her being in the very same place she was when I first loved her. It's just ugly, sad, and unfulfilling. She was a modern-day Jane Austen heroine. Now she's a parody of herself starring in a Keystone Cops version of maturity. Bleh. It's an insult to those of us who loved Bridget...and Mark.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (Vintage Contemporaries) Our Souls at Night (Vintage Contemporaries) Unaccustomed Earth (Vintage Contemporaries) The Lowland (Vintage Contemporaries) The Sandcastle Girls (Vintage Contemporaries) The Invisible Bridge (Vintage Contemporaries) Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Book #2: Vintage Fashion from the Edwardian Era (Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Books) (Volume 2) Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Book #3: Vintage Fashion from the Early 1920s (Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Books) (Volume 3) Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Book #8: Simple Vintage Fashions (Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Books) (Volume 8) Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Book #7: Vintage Fashion Layouts from the Early 1920s (Vintage Women: Adult Coloring Books) (Volume 7) Educating Physicians: A Call for Reform of Medical School and Residency [Hardcover] [2010] (Author) Molly Cooke, David M. Irby, Bridget C. O'Brien, Lee S. Shulman Revelations of St. Bridget: On the Life and Passion of Our Lord and the Life of His Blessed Mother Tom Jones: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling Junie B. Jones and Her Big Fat Mouth (Junie B. Jones, No. 3) Jessica Jones: Alias Vol. 1 (AKA Jessica Jones) Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business (Junie B. Jones, No. 2) The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World Adult Mad Libs: Talk Dirty to Me: A Filthy & Funny Adult Activity Book Filled with Naughty Mad Libs Mad About Animals Mad Libs Mad Libs for President (Mad Libs)
