Fielding brings back beloved single lady Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1998; Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, 2000).
The last time readers met Bridget she was on her way to a happily ever after with mild-mannered English barrister Mark Darcy. In this third installment, Bridget is once again looking for romance. She is now 51 and the mother of two young children, Billy and Mabel, from her relationship with Mark. (The fate of Bridget’s union with Mark is covered early on.) The opening pages find Bridget fretting about her new man, Roxby McDuff (yes, folks, that is his real name; sorry, Mr. Darcy). Roxster, as he’s called, is 20 years Bridget’s junior. She met him on Twitter. This “toyboy” is fun and flirty, but is he someone who can commit long term? The book considers the role of social media and mobile devices in modern dating, a time in which murky texts stand in place of phone calls and, well, actual dating. It’s here that Fielding is at her sharpest, with Bridget at one point boasting that she “lost 2lbs through texting thumb-action.” Any action, it seems, is better than none. The book also examines the pitfalls of dating later in life. Should you admit to your younger boyfriend that you can’t read the fine print on a menu card without pulling out reading glasses? And how many fart jokes need to be exchanged before you begin to suspect that your younger man is immature? Along the way, Bridget’s friends from the previous books resurface, not to mention a certain lecherous ex-boss, Daniel Cleaver, these days more vulnerable and lost. There are laugh-out-loud moments throughout: Bridget would not be Bridget if she didn’t have a makeup mishap (she accidentally applies mascara to her upper lip before a date) and yo-yoing weight issues (she admits herself into an obesity clinic; it doesn’t go well). But the writing is also characterized by a certain sadness as Fielding touches on loss and mortality and the passage of time. The ending feels rushed and many will wish Fielding had devoted more space to developing various romantic matters leading up to it. But one thing is certain: Bridget hasn’t given up on love. Nor should she. At any age. Not as rich as Fielding’s first two Bridget Jones books. Bridget’s fans will want it anyway. When Fielding is funny, she’s very funny.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35086-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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