Naptime Natter

Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy – A book review

I love Bridget Jones. I am a big fan of the films as well as the original books by Helen Fielding. When I sat down and opened up Mad About the Boy, I was so excited to find out what was next for our beloved Bridget, after finally marrying her Prince Charming Mark Darcy. The plot of the book was not what I was expecting but I still really enjoyed it and found myself laughing out loud on several occasions. If you are a fan of the Bridget Jones’s Diary books and films you are definitely going to love the third and final instalment, Mad About the Boy.

bridget jones mad about the boy
This book is impossible to review without giving away a spoiler. I won’t reveal the exact details but if you don’t want to know anything then maybe you should check out one of my other book reviews instead.
Ok, so here it is. SPOILER ALERT, Bridget and Mark are no longer together. You find out this information on the very first page so this is not a major secret, I will not reveal the circumstances as to why  Mark is not around though, you will have to read the book to find that out.

Mad About the Boy is all about Bridget’s life after Mark. For the past 5 years Bridget has been a single Mum to their 2 children Billy and Mabel.  Days of getting stuck up fire man poles are long gone as Bridget is now getting stuck up trees with her kids in the local park instead. Blue soup kitchen disasters have been replaced with mishaps with the kids spag bol and shop bought food being disguised as home made. Bridget is now battling the trials of the school run and getting to grips with the politics of play dates and making ‘mum friends’. Bridget continues to count calories, enjoy a glass or five of Chardonnay and her countless fags have been replaced with copious amounts of Nicorette gum. 
She may now be a mother of two but Bridget is still searching for her dream career and a new man; a born again virgin is how Bridget’s best friends describe her. Determined to meet someone new, Bridget gets herself on Twitter. The unspoken rules and secrets of the online world baffle Bridget, I was in hysterics reading all her social media woes and her tweets to her disappearing followers. Things have changed since Bridget was last single and we follow her journey to finding a man in the digital age. Be prepared to feel as though you have read a dating guide book as Bridget undertakes some serious reading and research to bag herself a new man. 
Along with navigating her way through the online world, Bridget is also attempting to start a career as a screenwriter. Bridget’s musing over modern day fashion and whether it is acceptable for a woman in her fifties to wear skinny jeans with an oversized handbag to a business meeting had me laughing away to myself. Bridget juggles meetings with the school run, texts from a disgruntled Nannie and tweets to the aforementioned toy boy. It is nice to know that even in her fifties Bridget’s interest in men still surpasses that of her professional life, some things never change hey?

I love Helen Fielding’s witty and snappy writing style and even though I am not a fifty something, single Mum, I really related to Bridget. I found her rants about social media, fashion, parenthood and relationships very refreshing and funny to read. I had tears in my eyes on more than one occasion, sometimes due to laughter and others were a result of Bridget’s bitter sweet approach to starting a new relationship.  

If you are looking for a book to make you laugh, make you think about this world we now live in and maybe make you cry a bit, then you should definitely read Mad About the Boy. If Bridget’s tales of head lice infestations and drunken antics at the school sports day don’t make you smile, I don’t know what will. Give it a go, it is v.v. good.
Have you read Mad About the Boy or any of the other Bridget Jones books? What did you think? If not, have I persuaded you to give it a read? I hope so 🙂

This post is linked to..

A Cornish Mum
My Random Musings

Cuddle Fairy

Mummuddlingthrough

My Kid Doesn't Poop Rainbows

Book review: The Girl on the Train

I recently finished reading this absolutely amazing book, The Girl on the Train, I am sure you have probably heard of it. The Girl on the Train is a debut, thriller novel written by Paula Hawkins. This is a very hard book to review without revealing any spoilers but I will try my best, I promise I won’t give anything important anyway.

One thing you should know before reading this book is you need to be prepared to let the housework pile up, your other hobbies to be ignored and your other half to be pretty much neglected for the time it takes you to read it. You will not be able to put it down and that, my friends, is a fact.

The Girl on the Train is a novel told through the voice of several different characters but the story predominantly belongs to Rachel, an unhappy divorcee, who is a borderline alcoholic. Rachel travels to work on the same train every single day and to add a bit of interest to her otherwise boring commute, she makes up stories about a couple she sees regularly from the window. The couple live in a house down by the train tracks. A house just doors down from the one that Rachel once shared with her husband Tom.

Rachel has named the couple Jess and Jason and she fantasies about their perfect life together. Jason a loving, protective husband and Jess a happy, beautiful wife. In Rachel’s mind they are the perfect couple, the definition of true love. They have the type of marriage she wishes she could have had.

One day Rachel’s fantasy of the couple is shattered when she spies something out of the window of the train. What she sees may seem irrelevant to anyone else aboard the 8.04 to London, but to Rachel it changes everything. Bad things start to happen, we learn more about the real people behind Rachel’s daydream, perhaps Jess and Jason are not as perfect as they may seem from the other side of a window? Perhaps Rachel has had more to do with recent, horrific events than she even realises herself? The reader is not the only one left wondering what is going on as, thanks to her drink problem, Rachel regularly blacks out, bits of the night before just disappear from her memory, sometimes lost forever.

The chapters switch between characters and by the end it is difficult to decide which narrative to trust. Hawkins makes sure you don’t figure anything out too early and she is very good at building suspense and leaving you hanging for pages on end, desperate to know what happens next. Sometimes the end of the book can be a bit disappointing, especially if you figure out the secrets the author wants to keep as a surprise before the big reveal. However, just when I thought I had figured  everything out, Hawkins spun the plot around and suddenly the story was running off, full speed in a different direction, one that I never saw coming.

If you are looking for an exciting, really well written page turner then you need to read The Girl on the Train. The voyeurism , complex characters and thrilling plot make this an absolute must for your book shelf. Make sure you read it before the film comes out too.

Have you read The Girl on the Train? What did you think? Have you got any good book recommendations for me? I would love to know your thoughts.

A Cornish Mum
My Kid Doesn't Poop Rainbows
My Random Musings

Book review: Dark Places

Remember Gone Girl? The book that everyone was reading a couple of years ago and it’s film adaptation that made us all realise Rosamund Pike is actually pretty awesome? Well, it turns out that was not Gillian Flynn’s first novel. A couple months a go I read her debut Sharp Objects and I loved it, not as much as Gone Girl  but I still loved it. Yesterday I finished her second novel Dark Places and, oh wow, it is brilliant. If you liked Gone Girl you will without a doubt enjoy this book too.
Like the book that brought Flynn into the mainstream in 2013, Dark Places is full of unexpected twists and turns, intriguing characters and it is completely impossible to put down, trust me. 

Dark Places tells us the tale of Libby Day, a woman in her early thirties who lost her mum and sisters to a brutal murder when she was only 7 years old. In the house at the time of the murders, Libby escapes and is convinced her teenage brother Ben was the man she heard slaughtering her family. After testifying against Ben in court, Libby’s brother is sent to prison.
We meet Libby several years later, she is an angry woman who is troubled by her tragic past. Never had a real job, Libby has been surviving off money from donations and trust funds. Now that money is running worryingly low, Libby finds herself in a bit of a predicament. Until, that is, she gets a phone call from a man called Lyle. Libby learns that Lyle is part of a group called The Kill Club. It is not as scary as it sounds, The Kill Club is a group of murder case fanatics. The members enjoy recreating real life murders, delving into the facts of unsolved crime and creating their own conspiracy theories. It turns out, the murder of the Day family is a very interesting case. Many people are convinced Ben is innocent and Libby is offered cash to go delving into her past, in order to find out what really happened the night her family was murdered.
Each chapter switches between the present day and the day Libby’s family were killed in 1985. We learn a lot about Ben, as well as Devil worship and farming life in Kansas. Just when you get absorbed in to the investigations of present day Libby, you are thrown back to 1985 and reading about the struggles of mother Patty Day and the life changing events that happened on her last day alive.
In true Flynn style, some of the language is very grotesque and gory. Although I felt uncomfortable reading on more than one occasion, especially in the chapter recounting the night of the murders, I still found myself completely engrossed in the story. As we learn more about what happened on that dreaded night, we are subjected to several, unpredictable twists in the plot. I won’t spoil the ending but I will say it is a very, very clever finish to an absolutely brilliant book.
If you are a fan of crime thrillers or if you loved Gone Girl, you really need to put Dark Places on your reading list. You won’t be disappointed.
Have you read Dark Places or any other Gillian Flynn novels? What did you think?  I am pretty sure Gillian Flynn has now become my favourite author.

My Random Musings
A Cornish Mum
Post Comment Love

Book review: Us

From the author who broke all our hearts with One Day and made us all laugh/cringe with Starter for Ten comes another book that you are going to seriously struggle to put down, and that book (obviously) is Us.

I love David Nicholls (if you haven’t read One Day you really need to..now, I am being serious) his books always captivate me from the very first page and by the last you feel like you have known his characters forever and are wishing the story didn’t have to end. I felt exactly this way reading Us, I was desperate to know what happened next.
Before we get to the end though (no spoilers), lets start at the beginning. Us is the tale of Douglas, a man in his 50’s who believes he and his spouse are happily married. That is until his wife, Connie, wakes him one night in the early hours and admits she is considering leaving him. This would be awful at the best of times but poor, clueless Douglas has already booked a family holiday, travelling around Europe for the summer. The trip is booked for Douglas, his unhappy wife and their teenage son Albie, who shares a very strained relationship with his father.
In a hope to save his marriage, and the hundreds of pounds already spent on the trip, the Grand Tour of Europe goes ahead. A series of mishaps ensues and I often found myself thinking ‘Oh Douglas, why did you say that?’. We quickly learn that all Douglas wants is to make his wife and son happy but, for several different reasons, he often struggles to achieve this. As the family travel all over Europe, Douglas sees himself getting in to all kinds of trouble – his shenanigans in Amsterdam are particularly hilarious – and on more than one occasion I was convinced this poor man would never please his already distant wife and his moody, ‘the whole world hates’ me teenage son. 
I loved that the story was not set in one place and Nicholls describes the big cities of Europe in beautiful detail. I have never been to Venice or Madrid but I feel as though I have. He made me long to visit Paris again and made me wish I appreciated art a little bit more. You come away from this novel feeling like you know just that little bit more about this continent we live on, seeping with culture and history.  
I found myself conflicted at times reading Us. I just could not decide if I wanted Douglas and Connie to stay together. His wife’s character is so complex and different to his own, I  often thought maybe this trip was all in vain, perhaps their marriage isn’t worth saving. However, at other points I so desperately wanted them to stay together because it is clear how much Douglas loves Connie and does not want to be without her. I won’t tell you the outcome of their journey (both marital and the physical trip), all I will say is when I read the very last sentence I had a smile on my face.
Have you read Us or any other David Nicholls novels? Do you love his books too? If you are looking for something to read I hope this review encourages you to give Us a go.

Fa`mily Fever

Where to next?