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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Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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