Your job is gone, your engagement is off, and your severance package will end soon. What else can you do? Start packing. Don't forget to bring a beach read! When stressed-out, twenty-six-year-old Julia Cordeiro watches her job on Wall Street implode on the same day she gets dumped by her fiancé, she makes a spontaneous decision to escape to a sleepy fishing village one hour from Florianópolis 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 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, exposes her weaknesses, and forces her to question her values. Quite possibly, Santa Marta will be the one place where Julia finally gets it right.
About the Author: Jennifer Paz was raised in Princeton, NJ by professorial parents who dragged her, headphones-and-all, to Walden Pond as a preteen and tried to instill Thoreau's mantra of "Simplify, Simplify," in her mall-addled mind. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and majored in Fiction and Latin American Studies, with a Junior Year at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Upon graduation, Jennifer studied screen writing at Film and Video Arts in New York City. Only after completing an MBA and a roller-coaster career in International Finance, did she have the good sense (or temporary insanity) to take a writing sabbatical in South America and begin an early draft of this novel. Jennifer currently works as a Marketing Strategist in New York City and Latin America and does much of her writing in airport lounges, fueled by bad coffee and jelly beans.