Set in Buenos Aires, Daisy is a thirty-five-year-old American, fleeing from a failed marriage and dwindling career back home in Seattle. She's in Buenos Aires to ahem, study the water system even though she's really not qualified to do so. (Interesting waste of grant money, right?) Isolde is an Austrian who is eager to reinvent herself as a glamorous socialite in a city where Europeans are automatically allotted upper-class status. And then there is Leonarda, an Argentine with radical dreams of rebellion. All three women are train wrecks of epic proportions.
I had a friend who spent a little over a year in Buenos Aires, so I was already a little familiar with the way foreigners are treated and behave in Argentina. I used to joke that all he saw was the expensive areas, and never quite saw what the country really was like. (kind of like the folks that stay at a resort in Cancun and think they've seen Mexico, lol) I loved the author's descriptions of Buenos Aires, the characters? No so much. I hated them and the superficial relationships. Here I am, nearly the same age as Daisy and I couldn't identify with her at all. (in fact, I think if I met her in person, I'd eat her alive) And Leonarda? Don't even get me started. Oh, forget it. The author's writing style is wonderful. It's a good book - if you can get past them and the whining, scheming, and all that jazz.
The Foreigners by Maxine Swann is a paperback fiction book published by Riverhead Books. It is 272 pages long. The suggested cover price is $15.00, and Amazon has it available on pre-order as of this posting. It is also available in hardcover edition, as well as an e-book for the Kindle and other e-readers.
I received a copy of this book in order to read it and share my thoughts on it. All opinions are my own, and not that of the author(s) or publisher.
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