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Becoming Brazilian

When stressed-out twenty-six-year-old Julia Cordeiro loses her job on Wall Street and, on the same day, gets dumped by her fiancé, she makes a spontaneous decision to escape to a sleepy fishing village in southern Brazil before she also loses her mind.

The relaxed atmosphere of Santa Marta is completely contrary to the intensity of New York City, and Julia blissfully doesn't know a soul in the rugged coastal town -- it's exactly the kind of place she needs in order to reinvent herself. But it's not as easy as it sounds, because Julia doesn't quite know who she wants to be.

Through a series of romantic foibles and cultural mishaps in her adopted home, Julia learns the hard way how to finally differentiate between love and lust; relationships and one-night stands. Along the way, she meets an array of unusual characters who become her unlikely friends: a young boy with a presidential name, an older Chilean man, a disgruntled office worker from London, an attractive Brazilian innkeeper, a Finnish traveler with rock-star magnetism, a local transsexual and expert in feminine charm, and a too-young-to-be-any-good-for-her surfer. Each new encounter challenges Julia's ideals and exposes her weaknesses, until she must make the hardest decision of her life. Only then can she begin putting herself back together again. Quite possibly, Santa Marta will be the one place where Julia finally gets it right.

Set against the exotic landscape of Brazil, with its lazily sensual lifestyle, Becoming Brazilian is a fast-paced and light-hearted adventure story for young modern women who are full of questions about life’s priorities, and not afraid of traveling alone.