Fracture by Megan Miranda - Review

Fracture by Megan Miranda

Publisher: Walker Childrens

Release Date: January 5, 2012

Source: Library Book
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"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?

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."

"If you had one day left to live, what would you do?"

Fracture starts off with a man in white who is "decidedly not God" (he is really the doctor in the hospital). We flashback to Delaney's accident and that's when it starts to pick up and get exciting.

Two things: The plot was excellent. The pacing was perfect.

We are immediately drawn into action after a short prelude. Miranda wastes no time with introductions, and that's what I look for in a story. I want it to pull me in within at least the first 5 pages so I can get hooked on it, and I'm glad to say that that is exactly what happened with Fracture! :)

There are only a few main characters in this book: Delaney, Decker (her best friend/neighbor), and Troy. I must say, Decker was a very annoying character for the first 2/3 of the book, but softened up a bit towards the end. Delaney meets Troy in a library, where he seems to know a little bit too much about her. We later find out that he had a similar accident as Delaney and possessed the same powers that she possessed. There are many twists and turns within Troy & Delaney's relationship, and there is a big reveal at the end regarding Troy.

Honestly, I think that the characters made up the weakest part of the story. Miranda did not succeed in trying to convey the character's emotions correctly, and I sometimes found myself confused, wondering if the person speaking was angry, sad, or joking/sarcastic. It would have helped to describe the way they were talking in a more pronounced way, so readers wouldn't get confused about the relationship between the characters.

Even with the lack of character development, this book took my breath away. It is another mostly-serious, meaningful book, which I really like. :) It reflects on the meaning of life and death perfectly. Although there are a few loose ends (which will never be tied since this is a standalone novel), I really enjoyed reading it. It is well-written, considering that it is a debut novel, and I especially enjoyed the last few chapters, which is where the meaning was held the most. Mixing love and tragedy along with discovery and finding our purpose in life, you won't want to miss out on Megan Miranda's shiny new debut novel, Fracture.