FICTION

Twenty-nine-year old Dahlia Finger discovers she has brain cancer and has less than a year to live.

In one sentence, this is the plot of "The Book of Dahlia," Elisa Albert's novel about a young woman's battle with cancer. How Dahlia reacts to the news and how she interprets the interminable days that follow turns the classic protagonist-faces-an-unforeseen-illness narrative into a work that is both marvelously witty and emotionally devastating.

The daughter of divorced parents and the sister of a rabbi, Dahlia spends her youth trying to dodge the drama of her Jewish family and trying to figure out what to do with her life, until a sudden collapse in the novel's opening pages decides for her. Less than 10 pages into "The Book of Dahlia," the tumor is identified (level four Glioblastoma multiforme) and the diagnosis made (" 'She's got nine months,' said the head of Neurology on the second day. 'Tops.'").

Following characters chapter by chapter toward their end, especially when they've done nothing to solicit the problems they face, is a difficult enterprise, but what makes the following pages bearable is Dahlia's unique narrative voice. By turns caustic, hilarious, angry, frightened, remorseful and politically incorrect, Dahlia faces the various physical and emotional obstacles of cancer battles in a way that makes the novel neither a pity party nor an unrealistic story of salvation.

This works because the novel is divided into chapters that mime those found in most illness-recovery texts: "Understanding Your Diagnosis," "Heal Yourself" and "Forgive and Forget." Dahlia's responses to questions posed in a particular book she finds in a Barnes & Noble are characteristically both sour and sweet, taking us back into her childhood; they also reflexively call into question the role of books -- both novels and self-help guides -- as coping mechanisms in our own personal struggles.

By the heartrending final chapters, Dahlia's battle with cancer develops into an attempt to accept her mortality -- but even then, Dahlia's wit and defiance never falter.

It's a rough journey, but Albert's prose hits all the right emotional points without delving into saccharine sentimentality; by the end of the novel one yearns for a few more chapters, just to continue reveling in Dahlia's voice.

Like Dahlia herself, readers of "The Book of Dahlia" will wish for just a little more time.
Zak M. Salih is a freelance writer who lives in Arlington County.