The Foreigner misses the boat

At first, it seemed like Meg Castaldo was trying to make a point in her first novel, The Foreigner. It almost appeared as if she wanted to illustrate in words the plight of the American working woman, lacking direction and purpose in the metropolis. Lonely and surrounded by lunatics, twenty-eight-year-old Alex Orlando is searching for something but she's so caught up in the meaninglessness of life that she can't figure out what that is. This novel has potential for about the first three pages.\nAfter that, Castaldo slips into a literary rut where each page sounds exactly the same as the last. Her style is equivelent to that of a fourth grader commanded to insert a metaphor into every other paragraph. As a result, the novel comes off as a borring and uninteresting read, dry as the Sahara but a whole lot smaller. \nHer characters are underdeveloped and at times, teetering on offensive with her stereotypes of foreign characters in her book. It's not hard to notice that all the foreign characters in the book are involved in some sort of shady dealings, while the Americans are clean and trustworthy, while granted a little eccentric. If Castaldo was trying to say "everyone is messed up," she failed and proclaimed, "everyone from a different country and with an accent is messed up."\nPerhaps if Alex had someone half-way decently developed to interact with the novel would come off as something more than a not-so-witty play on the classic detective story. As it stands, Alex's conversations are pointless and add little to the story, while her inner dialogue only rehashes everything the reader has already learned in previous chapters. There's nothing like a little mindless repetition to insult the reader. Good job Castaldo.\nThe story follows Alex as she house sits her uncle's New York City apartment. She finds a bad job and a lot of neurotic playmates, then gets involved with a bunch of people who later make cameo appearances with such utter predictability that it would make Dickens proud. There's all sorts of fun little adventures for Alex to bore the death out of the reader with, including an unbelievable plot shift from a light-hearted romp through the city to a not-so-mysterious mystery story with a dead guy who, after he dies, seems like a waste of character development.\nCastaldo struggles from the start of this novel, then starts searching for ways to make it worse. The happy, everyone-is-okay ending is trite and destroys any semblance of respectability Castaldo may have left at that point. This is her first book, and unless she improves her style or comes up with an original plot idea, it will probably be her last.