Review: Fracture by Megan Miranda

Fracture by Megan Miranda
Release Date: 5th January 2012
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: 3/5


Goodreads description:


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.


My thoughts:


Fracture started with a bang but sadly for me, it ended on a whimper. The story fizzled out to the point I wasn't really sure why I was still reading it. There was no real resolutions; it's almost as though Delaney shrugged off everything that made her and the book so interesting. 


Delaney is a fantastic YA heroine. She's real, she wasn't the 'perfect' girl we see a lot; mildly anti-social, overweight, riddled with quirks and habits she felt like someone I knew rather than someone I was reading about. Her crisis throughout the whole book was really interesting to be a part of and yet at the same time I felt it wasn't explored as fully as it could've been. It's almost as though the author wasn't sure which direction to take the book in--should it be contemporary, a thriller or paranormal and instead tried to work all three elements in with limited success, leaving none of the strands fully explored or explained. Delaney's mother was another character I liked, as fleshed out as her daughter--her reactions were as I would expect if the characters were real. 


It was the male characters that let the book down for me. They were awful cliches, almost as if the author didn't know how to write them. We had Decker, the boy next door, the best friend and love interest. Typical 'good guy' character. And Troy; damaged, emotionally scarred, unpredictable--the typical 'bad boy' and Delaney's father was so nothing-y I barely noticed he was there. 


As I mentioned, the plot started out well, with Delaney dealing with the extensive ramifications of her time under the ice and subsequent coma. Everything that happened after the mid-way point in the book was dead weight in my opinion. Her crisis seemed to right itself at the last minute, all her conflicts resolved and yet didn't and I was left feeling mildly dissatisfied. 


Despite that, it was an interesting read. The writing was fantastic and the main reason I actually finished the book. I enjoyed Delaney's thought processes laid out on the page, they were authentic and not too over-dramatic. The moral and emotional dilemmas added depth to the narration even though they were unsatisfactorily dealt with in the end.


If you're looking for something that bit different, this book's for you. It's unlike nothing I've ever read before and Delaney is a refreshing main character. As long as you don't mind a love story that feels like an afterthought, you'll enjoy this book.