Title: Fracture
Author: Megan Miranda site Format: ARC, 262 pages
Release Date: 1/03/12
Publisher: Walker & Company
Source: Pre-publication buzz tour
“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?”
How it starts:
Delaney and her best friend Decker (17) go to some play kind of game in the snow with their friends in the small town of Falcon Lake, Maine. They decide to take a shortcut over the lake and end up regretting it. After Decker runs ahead, Delaney trips and falls, creating a fracture in the ice and falls through.
She then wakes up after being in a coma for 6 days. She was not expected to make it; she’d been under the freezing cold water for eleven minutes. It’s almost unheard of to make it after seven. The doctors say it’s nothing less than a miracle.
Though Delaney can still walk and talk fine (strangely without even needing rehab), her damaged brain seems to have rewired itself in strange ways. She feels an unexplainable “tugging” and “itch” in her brain while in the hospital. What does this mean?
Characters:
I have mixed feelings about Delaney (protagonist). I definitely liked her, and pretty much everyone, for the first 50-75 pages or so; but then it seemed like her character development just came to a standstill, leaving her feeling kind of 2D. And then she does something incredibly stupid (mentioned in Troy description). I will say kudos to Miranda for not making her character the normal short, skinny heroine girl. Delaney doesn’t really play the hero. I believe she even said at one point “I’m not that kind of girl”.
I hated that Decker (best friend/romantic interest) was so hot and cold so much of the time. There is kind of an explanation for it, but still. It made him really hard to like. During the beginning of the book I was yelling at the characters to just get together already. But then Decker’s character is kind of a jerk half the time. I personally wasn’t really rooting for either of them. Neither one really seemed that desirable.
And then there’s Troy (other romantic interest. Yep, it’s a love triangle. Ugh). Honestly I didn’t really like Troy either. He was really kind of creepy, even in the beginning. Until Delaney’s character finds out more about him, I don’t see his appeal. I mean, Delaney gets in his car, and later in his apartment, after only knowing him for all of 5 minutes. I couldn’t help yelling “stranger danger” in my head.
Of the three main characters, there really wasn’t one I was rooting for, which sucks. As a reader, I want to want the book’s characters to succeed. But I just didn’t get that in Fracture.
Plot:
The plot wasn’t half bad. The whole mysterious “tugging” to others and Delaney wondering whether she’s crazy or not kept me entertained. There was a problem with the pacing though. As it got toward the end, it felt kind of rushed. Like there was so much going on, and not enough space in 250 pages to say everything.
The ending lacked any closure or answers. And without a cliffhanger (there isn’t any sequel planned), it just seemed like Fracture ended so abruptly. Delaney’s family is kind of falling apart, and then she has her special ability to deal with and nothing gets resolved. Basically in the end, there’s a death, a kiss, THE END. It was like the author was writing and all of the sudden was incapacitated on page 262 (last page) and the publisher just published what they had without an ending. This feeling is probably due to the lack of “hope for the future” that usually ends stand alone books.
Overall:
Fracture didn’t do it for me. At the beginning, I thought I had a real hit on my hands but it was not meant to be. This book may make a splash for others, but from me, Fracture gets a thumbs down. I give it 2.5 stars for at least having a very intriguing beginning.
