Author: Megan Miranda
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Released: January 5th 2012
Pages: 261 (Paperback)
Buy: Amazon UK / Amazon US
Add on Goodreads
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?
I've had Fracture on my TBR list for a long time, but after I read an ARC of Hysteria, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy asap. Hysteria blew me and my expectations away, and with a promising synopsis, I had high hopes for Fracture. Did it meet them? Well, I'm not entirely sure.
Delaney died. It took eleven minutes for them to rescue her from the lake, and when they pulled her out, she was stone-cold dead. Or so they thought. Delaney is an anomaly, an enigma; she came back to life with no brain damage whatsoever. Well, no, that's a lie - Delaney can sense when someone is about to die. Enter Troy Varga, a fellow coma patient, who inflicts contrasting feelings from her. Add this mess to being behind at school, lacking a social life, family issues, and complications with her best friend, Derek? Maybe Delaney would have been better off dead.
A lot of authors have attempted to write YA novels surrounding the issue of near-death experiences, comas, and coming back to life. Some are great, and some are downright terrible; there is a very thin line between a tear-inducing story and the same-old-same-old kind, yet I think Miranda landed smack in the middle of that line. For a debut, it was pretty fantastic, as the characters held a bit of depth and the plot was obviously well-thought out. The writing wasn't great, and at times the plot didn't seem to be going anywhere, but that was always quickly resolved.
Delaney was a bit like marmite - you either liked her, or you hated her. I liked her to a certain extent, but she did have some very unbelievable qualities about her (namely one second mauling her best friend, and the next flat-out ignoring him for no good reason). She wasn't just a mystery due to her surviving - she was a mystery because she was one weird, emotionally unbalanced kid! Though maybe that's what happens to you when you die and come back to life?
I was a bit confused at the dynamics between Delaney and the two main love interests. I think I was expecting a more in-depth analysis of Troy, which we didn't get, and so he remained a bit of a stranger despite being in over half of the book. The same goes for Derek - although I was rooting for him to win, I didn't find myself becoming attached to him.
I think I expected a lot of the plot lines to lead somewhere, and they didn't - I almost wanted to sit down and rewrite parts of the story so that the reader found out just a little bit more of Delaney's social life. I'm a nosey person, and I wanted to know more about Derek and Tara, and more about Troy's past, and more about the friendship group. A lot of Fracture revolves around the family dynamics, which I personally can find a bit dull if overdone, especially if nothing exciting happens - which it didn't (apart from the whole death thing).
As I said earlier, it was a good debut, but it didn't make me want to fall down on the floor and cry with feels. It was mediocre, and I guess from reading her second novel first, it was bound to be a disappointment. However, since I've already read Hysteria, I know that Miranda vastly improves on all the points I've picked out, and it really is a breathtaking read. Although I'm not in love with Fracture, I'm glad I read it.
Rating: 3/5
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