Shebooks

40 pages, $2.99

Review by Lynne Weiss

I thought I was going to love Sarah Einstein’s collection of four essays, Remnants of Passion, as soon as I read the first sentence: “Mommy Buddha is grousing again, hitching up his skirts and planting his big, black Chuck Taylors into the rutted mud of the road.”

I knew I was going to love it a few pages later when I laughed out loud, because I really love good writing that startles me enough to make me laugh. Having read the collection a few times now, it’s hard to remember exactly which sentence was the first one that made me laugh out loud, but it might have been the one in which our narrator/protagonist describes overhearing an ex-boyfriend (specifically, the one she describes as Terry-who-was-my-boyfriend-before-that-awful-business-with-the-cops-and-the-weed) describing a Thanksgiving at his parents house, and “his father grousing at the words we’re using on the Scrabble board, words he doesn’t know, words like textual and orality, which he says don’t sound like good Christian words to him …” The sentence goes on, though I’m not going to include it all here, because I’m supposed to be the one writing this review, and Einstein has a gift for writing long sentences woven of many strands of meaning and experience that carry a reader into the very sensations and sensuality of the world she is describing in these essays. Continue reading →