Nordie's at Noon: The Personal Stories of Four Women Too Young for Breast Cancer Book

An ultimately unhelpful book for the majority of women struggling with breast cancer. These four friends had similar resources, good health insurance, steady jobs, and almost the exact same personality. Even the separation of sections with tags denoting that particular author didn't help the confusion much.
They all got cancer at a young age. They all had their sorority, jobs, insurance, churches to support them.

Cancer ravages indiscriminately. This book has no use as a resource for most women (especially if those women are non-Christians, or don't have health insurance). It's main value is as a guide for well-to-do young women stricken by cancer. It will help a select few. It will piss off others who read it, especially if they too are suffering from cancer.

According to the women in this book, the only way to put up a fight with cancer is:

- to have great health insurance
- to have even better insurance which allows you to visit all kinds of specialists and get second, third and fourth opinions
- to have a job where the staff and supervisors are understanding and supportive of recovery
- to join a church
- to start tithing to your church
- to strengthen a your relationship with the Christian god
- to have a HUGE social circle that you can then trim down to just the ones who will help you through this

Even with all the money in the world, cancer cannot always be overcome, this is true and shared in the book. But all the authors encourage fighting cancer as though everyone can even go to a doctor regularly enough to be diagnosed in time to even do anything.

The one star I gave this was for the editing job done and even though it has nothing to do with the writing, for the work these women have done for charity and funding cancer research. The writing itself was riddled with cliches and each woman's story seemed to melt into the others until at the end it basically turned into Chicken Soup for the Christian Cancer Survivor's Soul. If this undergoes re-writes, I hope it provides resources to those young women who are not as lucky and as privileged as these ladies are. Even the title, "Nordie's at Noon" shows that these women could meet in the middle of the work day to eat at a relatively expensive cafe. Or at least, too expensive for your average twenty-something woman.