Eti Elbot
Psychological exploration of the nature of evil reveals the destructive impact of poor parenting on an unwitting child who grows into a bewildered and misguided young man.
In her newly released novel When Evil, Eti Elbot explores how a parent’s lack of faith in her child leads him to a life of drug pushing, petty crime, and street gang violence.
Even before his birth, Joao Adao Jovem’s mother resents and despises him. What’s more, she believes her newborn son is literally the son of the devil. Born into a world of pain and terror, young Joao has no way of knowing that his mother is treating him the same way her mother treated her.
With his father nearly always absent and his mother’s abuse and rejection unceasing, Joao, desperate for acceptance, falls into the wrong crowd. The inevitable challenges adolescence brings merely raise the stakes higher. Embarking on a dangerous life defined by drugs, crime, and violence, the brainwashed boy believes in his heart that he is in fact evil.
Rosana, by contrast, has faith in Joao, as does her brother Edson, but is their faith enough to exorcise the evil demons from Joao’s soul brought on by his mother’s growing madness? Can the wise mentoring he receives from two elders, the fisherman Geraldo and his godmother Emilia, compensate for the deliberate damage his mother inflicts? Is it even possible for Joao, renamed Jas, to overcome the destruction deliberately wrought by his mother?
Elbot comments, “In many cases, complications for children derive from their dysfunctional relationships with their unprepared, unaware, and unhappy parents. When Evil explores this dynamic in a compelling, harrowing, and highly entertaining story.”
“Elbot’s novel zeroes in on one boy’s life on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The world has never been kind to Joao Adao Jovem. His mother, Lilian, has recoiled from him since his torturous birth…Such is the conventional coming-of-age narrative that emerges from Elbot’s Omen-like opening…Elbot is on a laudable mission: she’s after a deeper, psychological explanation of the nature of evil –something man-made and curable. This nature-or-nurture exploration of evil is harrowing…”- Kirkus Review
AUTHOR: Eti Elbot was born in France in 1937. Her family fled from occupied France to Morocco in 1942 before returning to France after the Armistice on a U.S.Air Force Flying Fortress in 1945. With her family, she boarded a ship from France to Israel in late 1948. Married in 1955, her husband took Eti and their daughter from Israel to Brazil in 1958. There, Eti was the owner and director of a fashion business for women and also graduated in psychology. In December of 1994, Eti arrived in Melbourne, Australia, where she post graduated in family therapy and worked with refugees suffering from PTSD. She also became a builder/developer and now is focused on her writing. Fluent in French, Portuguese, Spanish, English,and Hebrew, Eti loves her family on a daily contacts basis and paints (oil on canvas), sings, and dances in her free time.
Says Eti: Please, visit my website at www.whenevil.com to read the testimonials. My first book launch in Melbourne will be on 13th November 2013 at Oakleigh Hall, 142 Drummond Street, Oakleigh 3166 from 7pm till 9pm.
