A book with many revelations . . . . . .

Some books are read because the already words expressed serves as an endorsement about what we found in the first several pages. There are also other visual reasons that come into play, including the cover, the inside pages as they are fanned, and the title. Of course, there is mainly one reason why lovers of the written word choose to read: the pure enjoyment. This self-satisfaction is not one that is acquired overnight – it is a learning process. We have discovered to avoid potential disappointment: what categories, subject matters, and who the author is from past books read are the guides for our selections. However for myself, there are two other reasons that excite my choices: the mystery of this he/she unknown to me and that personalization felt from the clips I read in the initial scan, but written only by the author.

     Estherleon Schwartz’s “Tears of Stone And My Deal With God†took me on a whirlwind page-turner. Her written style of presentation, which I call a diary read, but blended with prose, I found to fulfill the descriptions of delightful and charming. I can envision her life being retold on the silver screen, beginning during 1930-40s, all staged on the East Coast and fictionalized with the drama elements found in both a Jacqueline Susann and Sidney Shelton novel, but no scene with the Oreo cookies. I can only picture Joan Collins munching on caviar and crackers, and I am certain any experienced playwright could put together a rags to riches, ‘hooker’ to holy woman film, that when compared to Alex Hailey’s jumbo jet flick by the box office reviewers, Mr. Hailey’s would view like they were just crop-dusting on Walton’s Mountain, dull as watching cement harden.

     “Tears of Stone And My Deal With God†is not for one who wants more in their biography and history reads or even those who want and need to reap a gladness in the end that the earthly man and woman are seen riding off into the sun. However, this is a book about only one woman’s personal life journey, laced with all of the trails and errors, ups and downs, ins and outs, the starvation for a mother’s acknowledgement for her achievements, that love that truly bonds a daughter to a mother as well as son to father, but in the end and although He is not humanly visual, Estherleon “Esty” Schwartz does like Dudley Do-Right and achieves her goal and she is no longer twenty paces behind Him.

     Visit this performing spiritual songbird at www.estherleon.com and if possible, your financial as well as other means of support keeps her calling by Him in an endless mode of Goodwill – paying forward.

Review by Ben Rayman