BOOK REVIEW : Breaking the Silence Surrounding Rape : STILL LOVED BY THE SUN: A Rape Survivor’s Journal <i> by Migael M. Scherer</i> ; Simon & Schuster; $19; 213 pages

The FBI gives the figure 90,000 to account for the number of rapes reported in the United States each year. Police and rape-crisis centers agree that the figure is probably only a fraction of the number of rapes that occur.

When I was asked to review this book, I felt the same jolt of dread that intrudes on each one of Migael M. Scherer’s days following her assault, that dread she calls “the circling shark.” The suffocating fear during a rape is universal, and hideously familiar to this reviewer, who has also lived to tell a similar story; the details of the crime, however, are as astonishingly individual as a fingerprint.

Scherer does provide a riveting account of the rape and near strangulation she survived in a local Laundromat and of her subsequent journey through immediate legal and medical procedures. Her recollections of the most minute details of the crime are perversely entertaining, as she recalls how the officer who responds to her distress offers to sort her laundry so that her clothes can dry while Scherer makes her statement. But the observations soon turn grim in the hospital exam room, where Scherer is combed, scraped and photographed for evidence: She realizes that “all of this would have been done (in the same way) if I were dead.”

Although Scherer is writing under her own name, she is frustratingly incomplete in the presentations of herself. All we know is that she celebrates her 41st birthday in the book, and that she is startled to learn after the attack, that, in her husband’s estimation, she is a small woman. Besides a brief reference to former work as a teacher and editor, there is no texture to Scherer’s character outside of her suffering. This is unfortunate, because the most important contribution this book makes is attempting to refute the specter of the nameless, shapeless, shadowy victim.

Scherer is a veritable role model for following the right steps in coping with an assault: She reports her attack to the police, she seeks counseling and she transfixes her friends and family with a continuing narrative of facts and feelings. But it is this self-revelation, although therapeutic for Scherer, that wears on even an empathetic audience of readers.

Advised by a counselor not to “take the blame” for her turmoil, and reassured by a friend “I’m always available--and always fascinated by anything you have to say,” Scherer taxes the reader with unlimited self-expression, punctuated by a bland and weirdly repetitive litany of the aids to her recovery.

“What powerful and restorative medicine cruising is,” she tells us while on shipboard; “Margaret has introduced me to a powerful therapy,” is Scherer’s assessment of yoga class. Even her experience with a rape survivors’ support group is compared to the creation of a necklace that “glowed with hope.” In an otherwise moving story, it is difficult to get past this anthropomorphic style where conceptual nouns--forces or emotions--are given lives of their own.

The most dramatic moment, besides the rape itself, occurs when Scherer looks down on her attacker from the witness stand, but the language she chooses to explain her reaction (“A dull rage expanded to fill the space”) dilutes the intensity of the scene.

Clearly, Scherer is a blessed with a close circle, but her documentation of her time in need of them is a soggy repetition of hugging and swaddling. A friend who writes to comfort Scherer is on the mark when he reveals a past brush with a cancer diagnosis: “I will spare you a description of the emotional topography of the crisis itself . . . but I did not want to keep silent about this.”

Ultimately, breaking the silence is Scherer’s triumph in publishing this book. Too many women will never have the courage, or even the breath, to tell of their own horror.