Bridget Jones's Baby

October 31, 2016
The fourth installment of Fielding's wildly popular Bridget Jones franchise is a blessed event. Fielding heads back in time from the setting of Mad About the Boy to chronicle the quirky, body-obsessed heroine as a professional producer in her late 30s embracing an unplanned pregnancy. The father is either her first love, Mark Darcy, or her former boyfriend, TV celebrity Daniel Cleaverâshe rules out an amniocentesis for a quick DNA analysis. Readers witness Bridget's sonograms, childbirth classes, and cravings for cheesy potatoes, . "The thing is, just as there is a big gap between how people think they are supposed to be and how they actually are, there's also a gap between how people expect their lives to turn out and how they actually do," Bridget writes. No surprises here: Bridget falls in love with her baby-on-the-way at first scan and bumbles into the romantic ending everyone but her saw coming all along. Though it's likely her fans will have already seen the movie about her bumpy baby ride, they'll still appreciate reading about a Bridget who, though less agitated, is still entertainingly erratic and entirely endearing.

October 15, 2016
One thing's for sure: one of these two ex-boyfriends is the father of Bridget Jones' baby."What would the Dalai Lama do?" Bridget asks herself when she arrives 15 minutes late to the christening of her friend Magda's baby in the opening pages of Fielding's (Mad About the Boy, 2013, etc.) fourth entry in this still-funny series about everyone's favorite dizzy British blonde. The Dalai Lama would probably not proceed to shag her ex-boyfriend Mark Darcy, whom she hasn't seen in years and who was until very recently married to a "stick insect" but has been sneakily appointed godfather to the same baby. When Darcy comes to his senses and makes himself scarce post-shag, would the Dalai Lama proceed to get drunk and naked with another famous fuckwit, her ex-boss, pompous television personality-turned-novelist Daniel Cleaver? Well, you never know. Perhaps the Dalai Lama would prudently refuse to have amniocentesis to determine the paternity of the baby out of fear of harming both the fetus and the gauzy thing that passes for a plot in these pages. (Though if you've read the previous book in the series, set many years in the future, you know whose child it is.) Pregnant Bridget is caught between her perennially smashed and slurring singleton friends and the tedious "Smug Marrieds": "Guess what? We've found you a nanny: Eastern European. She's got a degree in neuroscience from the University of Vilnius." Distracted by her predicament, Bridget's job performance is not at 100 percent. When a new producer is brought in to clean house at Sit Up, Britain, demanding stories with tension, action, and suspense, Bridget scours the news to no avail. "They're slimy, they're creepily silent--and they're lurking in your arugula--frogs!" "They're hexagonal, they suddenly change their form and they gouge out your eyes--umbrellas!" One hopes the Dalai Lama gets his hands on this book as soon as possible. If he can't clear up the morality questions, he'll at least get a good laugh.

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