Review: Fracture by Megan Miranda

FRACTURE
By: Megan Miranda
Published By: Walker & Company
Release Date: Jan. 17, 2012
Series: None
Pages: 264
Genre: Contemporary Fiction / Paranormal
Reading Level: Young Adult
Source: BEA
Buy the Book: Amazon

Goodreads Summary: Eleven minutes passed before Delaney Maxwell was pulled from the icy waters of a Maine lake by her best friend Decker Phillips. By then her heart had stopped beating. Her brain had stopped working. She was dead. And yet she somehow defied medical precedent to come back seemingly fine

-despite the scans that showed significant brain damage. Everyone wants Delaney to be all right, but she knows she's far from normal. Pulled by strange sensations she can't control or explain, Delaney finds herself drawn to the dying. Is her altered brain now predicting death, or causing it?

Then Delaney meets Troy Varga, who recently emerged from a coma with similar abilities. At first she's reassured to find someone who understands the strangeness of her new existence, but Delaney soon discovers that Troy's motives aren't quite what she thought. Is their gift a miracle, a freak of nature-or something much more frightening?

For fans of best-sellers like Before I Fall and If I Stay, this is a fascinating and heart-rending story about love and friendship and the fine line between life and death.



The idea that someone could clinically die and still return to life has always been intriguing to me. Would that person see the world differently? How would their life change? Fracture explores some of these questions in a perhaps unexpected way.

Delaney Maxwell spends eleven minutes trapped in an icy lake before she is rescued. Miraculously, she makes a full recovery from her coma, yet her MRI shows that something isn't right with certain areas of her brain. Despite this, Delaney seems fine, and eventually she is released to go home. But everything doesn't go back to normal. Delaney feels an unexplainable pull to those who are dying, and no matter how she tries, she can't seem to resist the urge to follow the pull. Soon Delaney meets Troy Varga, who also recovered from a coma and feels a similar pull to the dying. But Troy may not be exactly who he seems. As Delaney struggles to come to terms with her new life, with her feelings for her neighbor Decker, and with her tense relationship with her mother, Delaney learns a lot about human nature, life, and even death.

I have to admit that Fracture was not quite what I was expecting. I thought that Delaney would be looking for more from life, trying to piece things together as she wanted them. Instead, her near-death experience caused her to slowly break down and, as the title suggests, fracture. In some ways she struggled with survivor's guilt, but she also struggled to figure out what the pull to the dying meant and what she should do about it. With this, Fracture had an interesting blend of contemporary and paranormal elements. On one level, Delaney was trying to be a normal high school senior and sort out her feelings for Dexter, but on another level, she had a sort of sixth sense. I think that I enjoyed the contemporary aspect more than the paranormal. I could sympathize with the conflict that Delaney had trying to figure out her feelings for Decker as well as understand her relationship with her mother. The emotions were very intense and very well captured.

Then there was the paranormal aspect as well as Troy. Troy was intriguing at first, but then the fascination wore off. Even though I could understand his reasoning, I still had issues with it. In addition, while the paranormal aspect added something to the story, I think that it could have used a bit more fleshing out, and it still felt unresolved at the end. Despite this, the book definitely makes you think about what you would do with only one day left to live and makes you think about life in general.

Fracture is a compelling debut from Megan Miranda, one that I read in one sitting because I was so eager to know the full story. I will look forward to reading more from Megan Miranda!