How to Survive a Brazilian Betrayal

Lightening darkness with humor, Velya Jancz-Urban and her 25-year-old daughter, Ehris, introduce readers to their offbeat Connecticut family. Motivated by an 11-year friendship with a charming Brazilian named Jose Geraldo, they spend four years preparing for their move to rural Brazil, where they will run a dairy farm and open an English school. When they follow their hearts to Ponte Nova, an explosion of betrayal leaves them dazed and grieving. Broke and broken, they are forced to return to the United States, and navigate their rebirth in a foreclosed 1770 New England farmhouse. An already strong mother/daughter relationship becomes indestructible when no one else is emotionally available for them.

How to Survive a Brazilian Betrayal is written by a kooky, gregarious mother and perceptive, poised daughter. Blurbed by Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Mother-Daughter Wisdom, this memoir takes readers along on an unconventional family’s hilariously honest, yet heart-wrenching, journey. Readers will fall in love with their spunk, feel the knockout punches of betrayal along with them, and be rooting for them to get back up off the mat.

Despite their setbacks, Velya (the “charismatic weirdo”) and Ehris (the “sarcastic sophisticated healer”) still firmly believe that there is no growth without change, and that picking up the pieces of a shattered dream is better than having no pieces to pick up at all.