Fracture

Fracture by Megan Miranda
Paperback, 261 pages

Published January 5th 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

My shelves: arc-or-review, books-i-own, contemporary, death, read-in-2012, young-adult, really-good

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Description via 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? 

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 thanks go to Bloomsbury for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.

As soon as I heard about this novel, my mind likened the premise of it to Gayle Forman's If I Stay, which I didn't really enjoy, despite loving the whole idea behind it. Thankfully, in Fracture, Megan Miranda didn't let me down with her emotion-packed story.

Fracture tells the story of seventeen year old Delaney after she has an accident at a local lake, where she falls to her death through thin ice and drowns, leaving her dead for eleven minutes, until she is rescued by her best friend and neighbour, Decker. The accident itself is written extremely well and I almost held my breath throughout it. Emotionally, Delaney is your average teenager in a way that means  that the reader can hopefully connect to her - she is slightly neurotic, a little angsty and sometimes a bit vulnerable, but she is still strong, sensible and caring. I found Delaney to be a very genuine, down to earth and grounded character. Delaney isn't completely typical though, as after her accident she is left with a 'gift' (or a curse) that draws her to people who are dying. It is very interesting to see how she copes with this. This ability does add a slight paranormal feel to the book but it's certainly not dominating, I would still recommend this book to those who are not fans of fantasy genres.

Through her ability to sense death, Delaney meets a guy called Troy, who has a similar ability. I didn't instantly like Troy and Miranda does a great job of giving him a sense of uncanniness - I never felt at ease with him. He is a quite mysterious character and brought a lot of suspense to the book. As the book progressed, Troy became more and more manipulative and controlling which gave me a strong dislike to him. 

Unlike Troy, I loved Decker all the way through the story, even when he was being a little awkward and had some conflicts with Delaney. I enjoyed seeing how the accident affected him and also how it transformed his relationship with Delaney. I thought that the other friends in their circle were well formed, especially Janna who was a confident, strong female which is nice to see. The characters are a typical high school group who have varied personalities and they work well together, despite their friendships having expected occasional rifts. I would've liked to hear more about them near the end of the book, even if it was in an epilogue. 

I also liked the fact that Delaney's parents played quite a large part in the book as often the parents are forgotten about in Young Adult books. Her mother's relationship with her parents often reflected her worries and concerns over Delaney.

There is a good pace that is set from the beginning of this novel, but the last chapters of this story were particularly intense and I felt my emotions changing from page to page. There were plenty of unpredictable twists throughout, but the ending was on-the-edge-of-your-seat reading. Fracture was very difficult to put down, even though I didn't want the book to finish! The ending of the book isn't works well, but it all happened a little fast for me. Most things were tied up by the end, but I think that most of the book could've been explored more. However, the fact that it was concise made the book more intense and it held my attention.

This was a really gripping read and with the quality of it, it's hard to believe that it's Miranda's debut novel. I loved Miranda's descriptive but clear, well paced writing style and I would not hesitate to pick up anything else that she offers. Although this is targeted at the Young Adult age group, I can certainly see it appealing to adult readers too. This is a book that I'd recommend to nearly anyone.

Here is the official book trailer for Fracture: