Breast cancer is an issue that has touched me and many others in the Latino community personally. A new book out hopes to appeal to all women struggling with this disease. I Am Not My Breast Cancer: Women Talk Openly About Love and Sex, Hair Loss and Weight Gain, Mothers and Daughters, and Being a Woman with Breast Cancer by Ruth Peltason is a hardcover self-help book meant to act as a friend throughout all the different stages and challenges women with breast cancer have to confront. I loved the way that the book was organized, chronologically through the stages of diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and self-discovery. I also liked that this book wasn’t about one expert talking to those struggling with breast cancer. It was the unique and diverse voices of 800 women—from every state in the nation and from continents as far away as Australia and Africa speaking their truths about how they dealt with everything from how they were told about their diagnosis to facing mortality.

While I have been blessed enough to not have breast cancer, it runs on my mother’s side of the family and is a scary ghost that looms over me. I have lost two aunts to breast cancer and for as long as I can remember I have been warned on the importance of self-breast exams. Maybe because I am not personally the one dealing with the issue, I felt almost like a voyeur into the brains of those with breast cancer. That in itself was a good thing, because it offered discussion points for me to engage other family members who have survived breast cancer.

While the book promised to be diverse, and it certainly was, in terms of ages and geographically, I didn’t read any voices that sounded like my tias. That said, some relatives who were going through breast cancer when I was reviewing the book, found the book to be an additional resource, one they could consult in the privacy of their bedrooms, especially helpful when dealing with such personal issues as sexuality for example (what, you thought that women with breast cancer didn’t have sex?).

That said this book isn’t the type of book you read from beginning to end, rather, you read it from where you are at in terms of dealing with the disease.

Overall, there is quite a bit of information overwhelm about the issue of breast cancer, but I Am Not My Breast Cancer by Ruth Peltason is a welcome addition to the breast cancer library of lit because of the presence of so many unique personal voices.

Buy the book here.