Dear Stranger, Dearest Friend

E-mail and the Internet are phenomena not fully integrated into the characters' lives in this earnest, appealing debut novel told in the form of epistolary e-mail. After Lara Cohen, a 38-year-old freelance copywriter in Armonk, N.Y., discovers a lump in her left breast, she posts her fears on a breast cancer Web site's bulletin board. A breast cancer survivor named Susan Peterson from Canton, Ohio, responds with the right mixture of sobriety and jocularity, and an e-mail friendship is born. Over the year that the pair correspond, they confront the ravages of cancer and a good many other life events, including Susan's skirmishes with her 13-year-old daughter or Lara's with her youngest child. Some challenges are more weighty, like a shattering car accident in the Peterson clan, while both families courageously continue coping with a frightening disease. The women are candid with each other, poking fun, relaying medical data, admitting weaknesses and prejudices. Their personal minutiae gather into two distinct, believable and sympathetic livesDthanks to Becker's ability to create e-mail that defines each protagonist's personality. Becker knows that the Internet often stands in for doctors' advice, and lengthy e-mails to friends substitute for letters and diary entries. (As Lara notes, ""I stopped writing in my journal around the same time I started writing to you... in many ways, all the important ways, you've become my sounding board."") The agonizing route of cancer diagnosis and treatment is so painstakingly documented that it seems the author, a survivor herself, conceived the novel, at least in part, as a primer for other women confronting the diagnosis. This useful and humane function contributes to the book's appeal as an informative, realistic tale of the evolution of a friendship. (Oct.) FYI: October is Breast Awareness Month.