Posted in book reviews

I guess I am just destined to disappointment with my fiction choices.  After really liking Bridget Jones's Diary, I can barely make it through the sequel. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason has very little of the original's charm.  It drags on and on.  The entries are too long - no one writes out entire scenes with every bit of conversation and lots of description in their diaries!  If Helen Fielding wanted to write that way, she should have dropped the diary format.  Even the parts where Bridget counts things at the beginning of her entries are not funny in this book.  There are too many characters, too many long conversations with her friends, and a really silly breaking up with Mark Darcy.  A good emotional conflict is not one that could be resolved with one simple conversation if the annoying characters would ever actually talk to each other! 

The plot drifts all over the place.  I am about halfway through this book and don't know if I can finish it.  Of course, it's not as bad as Scarlett, but that at least could be blamed on a different author!  There is one funny part, which is where Bridget, thinking she will become a freelance celebrity interviewer, interviews Colin Firth. Suffice to say her career ends before it ever gets going. What's even worse is that this book routinely crosses the line over into vulgarity, which the first book did not do.  I am not big on vulgarity.

So far, Bridget seems less likeable and more annoying and stupid.  I cannot recommend this book, which is sad since I really enjoyed the first one.  I frequently laughed out loud reading that!  Sigh...