Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

1999, 2004 Penguin edition
Helen Fielding
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Original price $14.00, purchase price $5.43
Slightly worn paperback, with last 3 1/2 chapters missing!
B-

Perhaps it's not fair to judge this book when this printing is incomplete, but based on what I read, it's about equal to the original.  True, there are a lot more implausible things happening, including Bridget's Bangkok arrest for drug-smuggling, but I found it equally funny, especially of course her interview of Colin Firth.  (This ended up in the first movie, but only in the British version.  Now available on Youtube though.)  I also liked the mocking of self-help books.  This time the Austen inspiration is Persuasion, with Bridget getting bad advice from such books, and from her friends.

I do have to say, she's still a loser, arguably more of one.  She and Mark Darcy both make many unnecessary relationship mistakes, and this time she can't even find a new job when she's unhappy in her current one.  The book is presumably set in 1996, since it picks up right after the previous one, and yet it's got Bridget, Sharon, and Jude ogling Prince William, who would've been about 14, rather than the legal-in-Britain 17 he was when the book was first published.  

This book became a movie the year this edition was published, and from what I recall many changes were made.  I'm waiting for Book 3 to be marked down, so I don't know if I'll pick it up in time for this project.