Book Review: Mad About the Boy

Book: Mad About the Boy (Bridget Jones book #3) by Helen Fielding

Source: Library

Rating:  2 stars

Review:

It's been 14 years since readers have read about Bridget Jones and yet Bridget has not changed and unfortunately that's not a good thing. She's older but not wiser.

All she does is obsess about her weight and dating, as well as not getting a returned text from her boyfriend or that she doesn't have Twitter followers or that she's losing them.

There were times this story was funny but mostly it was boring. Aside from finding out how Mark Darcy died (this is not a spoiler, the author had made the announcement that Mark was dead before the book was released), there wasn't much to this story.

Yes, Bridget goes through the trauma of trying to learn how to date again, trying to use social media and raising her two kids but there was not a lot of interesting things going on. The story just felt stale and sort of rehashed.

Her friends were still in her life but even they felt one dimensional and they certainly didn't add anything to the story. And Daniel was still pretty much the same sleazy guy despite being older.

I wonder if Mrs. Fielding had wrote an alternate version of this story with Mark being alive. I think it would have been more interesting if the reader could have seen Bridget and Mark together and raising their children and messing up along the way. I don't think most readers wanted to read about Bridget being single again (albeit as a widow), readers have already seen that with the other two books. Because to me, in the end, Bridget just ended up finding a carbon copy of Mark (but with him being a bit more of a jerk). Which feels like a total cop out, the author may as well have kept Mark alive.

I'm really sad to say that I did not enjoy this. I was hoping it would be an interesting (and funny) journey for Bridget as she tries to figure out her life now that she's a widow. But there wasn't much of a plot here.