Mum's Monday: Bridget Jones - Mad about the Boy, written by Helen Fielding

This book was first published in 2013, 14 years after the book Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason back in 1999.

We now see Bridget, having married Mark Darcy, now widowed in her fifties and left to bring up their 2 children, Billy and Mabel, 6 and 4. This book sees Bridget coping/dealing with single parenthood, getting back into the dating game, through dating sites, and trying to write a screen play.

Mark however, hasn’t left Bridget destitute, she has a nice house, a nanny Chloe, a lifestyle where it seems it doesn’t matter if she works or not and Billy and Mabel go to a private school. There are some funny moments but some of it seems a bit unbelievable and therefore not real, which does knock the consistency of the series around a bit. Any problems with finding a baby sitter are miraculously solved. During one night it was Daniel Cleaver looking after the two children, but she questioned this decision when, by the end of the book, he ended up in a clinic, having mistaken Washing up liquid for an alcoholic drink. If he was that out of it on his bender to do that he would’ve passed out along while before his mistake, surely.

One of my favourite parts is when Bridget takes Mabel to the doctors with a bad finger, and whilst there, Mabel finds some sexual health leaflets and using the technique she has leant at school she spells out the word Gonorrhoea and then announces it in full. Bridget quickly put the leaflets in her bag, but forgets about them until she is in the company of Mr Wallaker, (a teacher at Mabel’s school) who notices them and thinks it is strange when Bridget announces the leaflets are in actual fact Mabel’s. Mr Wallaker’s reactions completed the two scenes.

Despite this, the book is a bit depressing. I can see where Helen the author was going with this but I don’t think she quite got there as much as the previous instalments. Yes, we would like to think that if anything bad happened to us or our family that the ones left behind would be well looked after, but I feel this book is a stretch to believe that problems would get solved so quickly.

We see her struggling with dating again and wondering if she is being unfaithful to Mark, or if she is actually ready to date again. This part is done well and realistic to the situation, but again it has a depressing edge to it. The book does have a happy ending but how it gets there is questionable.

I can see why Bridget Jones’s baby was made into a film instead of this one. The baby one has much more of an upbeat storyline and more believable.

You could say this one in chronological order comes after Bridget jones’s baby so this book could be made into a film but if they do I hope that they achieve what Helen missed and make it more realistic and less depressing. Although widowhood is naturally a depressing subject, and the situations along the way do happen to some degree, it does however, make me wonder why the storyline in this book was written this way in the first place.