Book Review: Fracture by Megan Miranda

By: Megan Miranda

Published by: Bloomsbury Teen

Released on: January 17th, 2012

Source: book from publisher to review

3 stars: It's A Good Read

Purchase from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound

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. 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? - quoted from Goodreads

Fracture's one of those books that's been on my radar for months. I've been really intrigued with the story that revolves around Delaney, the story's main character who was under water for 11 minutes, pronounced dead, and yet is now very much alive, or is she. Delaney's story is unheard of, both in the real world and in the YA world. I've not yet read another story like hers. Fracture is a book that definitely captured my curiosity on what Delaney's story would entail long before I picked it up to read it.

Delaney for me was a tough character to get to know. She's often times rough around the edges, but then has her few minutes where I felt like I got to see a different side of her. After her accident I felt like she became more distant to me as a reader, as well as to those around her. It's not like I can blame her for that, and that aspect of her personality felt realistic. She has very real side effects from the trauma she suffered, and though it was confusing at times to follow her random out bursts, I felt like Megan did an amazing job at capturing what it would really be like to be around Delaney or even in her shoes during this time. Delaney has some great love interests in her life, but I was a bit confused by her relationships with Decker and Troy.

Decker is a guy who I really wanted to love, but I found myself getting really irritated with him and Delaney. They're extremely close, have a great chemistry and it's obvious at how much they love each other and care for each other, but yet they get mad when the other one starts dating someone else. I felt like one minute they're warm towards each other and the next they act cold, and that left wanting so much more from the two of them. Then there's Troy. Wow, Troy is definitely one crazy character who's hard not to like despite the fact this guy is seriously a bit out there. He knows how to be charming when he needs to be, but he's got this other fearsome side to him that made me want to cower in the corner. I understood the draw that Delaney had to him. They bonded over something that no one else understood except the two of them, but I didn't get why if Delaney was so scared of him after a certain scene she went looking for him again. I got so frustrated at her for doing that for so many reasons.

Kudos to Megan for pulling my emotional strings with her debut. While there were parts of Fracture I enjoyed and other parts I had a hard time connecting with, Megan didn't fall short with pulling me into her story emotionally. Her writing is fabulous, and her ability to get me as a reader inside the mind of Delaney after her accident was mesmerizing. That part of the story felt completely realistic to me. It's not just Delaney who's mind Megan allowed me to see into, but also Troy's. His mind is by far more complex as Megan delicately and realistically shows what it's like to be in the mind of someone who's mentally unstable. It's heartbreaking, it's scary and complex.

Fracture is definitely a story that covers a variety of elements both realistically and paranormally. It's a book that includes romance, mystery, suspense, and a little bit of the "unknown". The wanting to know more is what kept me invested with reading this book. Overall I feel like this is a good read, it's just not one I loved as much as I really wanted to. In the end I needed a few things to be a little bit more resolved for me to really love the book. Having said that I think the realistic side of this story is one that a lot of YA readers will enjoy. There is some mild language, a few f-bombs, and an underage drinking scene in the book.