Review: Fracture by Megan Miranda

Summary/Cover Image from Publisher's Website:

In a striking debut, readers will be spellbound by this unforgettable story of life and death . . . and beyond

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.

Review:  

Prior to reading Fracture by Megan Miranda, I had heard many mixed things about it. Some people loved. Some people hated it. Some people fell somewhere in between the two. However, I tried it nonetheless, because not only did it look good but also it was being compared to two of my favorite books ever, Before I Fall and If I Stay. How did I end up liking it? Well, I felt Megan Miranda introduced an interesting and complex premise, one I truly enjoyed reading about, but it also had a few slight problems that knocked it down a notch or two on my scale.

Fracture introduces the character of Delaney just as she's about to cross the seemingly frozen lake to play a game of manhunt, one that's surly not to go well as she's the only red thing in a sea of white. However, her plans suddenly come to a halting stop when the lake suddenly cracks below her and she falls straight into the icy, frigid waters. She stays there for eleven minutes...her brain goes dead...her heart stops beating...she's need in every way. But she comes back to life. She gets a miracle. Not everything is as it seems, though, because now she can tell when someone is about to die. She's pulled towards them, but she doesn't know whether she should help or let them go? Which is better? With the aid of Troy Varga, a new boy in town, she may just find out, but will the consequences leave her to wish she were dead rather than alive? Only time and more pages can tell in this heart racing mystery in the coldest of Maine winters!

With the premise of Fracture, come some interesting ideas and plot lines. It was interesting to see how Delaney had changed as a person when she came back to life in not only the big ways (such as now being able to tell when people die) but also in the small ways (not really feeling alive or the same in her skin). It provided a somewhat Catch-22 as Delaney herself said in the book, and I certainly enjoyed reading about it, especially when things took somewhat drastic turns suddenly. Troy was an interesting addition to the story, and while I enjoyed the insight he brought to the story, I felt he was more a plot device than a character in some ways, which brought down Fracture a bit in my eyes. Moreover, while the basis of what he did was clear, some things remained a big mystery even in the end, which somewhat annoyed me a times to say the least. However, I did enjoy some of the other aspects of this novel, such as the romance that begins to brew between Delaney and her best friend, even if I would've loved some more development to it at times.

Moving on, the characters in this one were certainly interesting but I would have enjoyed some more development to some of them. Megan did a great job with Delaney, though, as not only did I truly feel her emotions escape the page and come to life, but I also felt she made Delaney's journey realistic and interesting given the circumstances. I also enjoyed the addition of Decker as well as the extra plot lines and drama he brought with his character throughout the novel as mentioned above. Lastly, I really liked Janna's character as well.

Megan Miranda's writing was decent overall. I really felt she did a great job of creating Delaney's characters as well as the plot lines and premise. However, I sometimes felt like some things need better explaining and closure, especially towards the end where everything moved at a rapid speed.

In all, Fracture is a decent debut, one that I'm sure fans of thrillers and supernatural books will enjoy. It wasn't always my cup of tea, but I did enjoy it, and I look forward to seeing what Megan comes up with next.

Grade: B

Fracture (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads) will be released January 17, 2011.

Source: Publisher via Netgalley