Review: Fracture by Megan Miranda

Fracture

Author: Megan Miranda

Summary: 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. 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

I absolutely loved this book. It was an intriguing, heart-stopping, fast-paced read that will leave you wanting more. Delaney Maxwell was just your average teenage girl with a best friend who also happens to be the cute boy next door Decker Phillips. While going to play a game out in the snow with her friends, she falls through the ice of a lake, and the next thing she knew, she was waking up in a hospital. She was pulled out of the water after being under for eleven minutes and somehow she survived. It is after this accident that she begins feeling a strange pull: an itch that starts in the middle of her brain and works its way through her body, pulling her towards something that at first she isn't aware of the reasoning.

After an incident in the hospital, her parents among others, begin to treat her differently. As if she is suicidal or on the verge of being psychotic. She can't explain to any of them what it is that she sees or feels because it will only make things worse. Then she meets Troy Varga, a boy who seems to know all the answers to the questions she's been asking herself because he too feels that same pull. Tensions rise between her and Decker as well as her parents, and the only person who seems to understand what she is going through is Troy. After surprising revelations come to surface, Delaney falls deeper into depression and feels truly alone, realizing that if she doesn't do something about her predicament, she might actually go as crazy as the people around her believe she already is. Then something truly tragic happens, spinning Delaney's world out of control, and it is then that she realizes just what it is she is supposed to use her strange abilities for.

I was actually a bit shocked by the ending. I wasn't expecting it to happen until right before, and I was honestly scared for Delaney for most of the book. She was putting her faith in someone who seemed to be a little bit unhinged, but also seemed to be the only one who didn't think she was truly crazy and who could help her. Her parents especially were treating her as if she wasn't even human anymore, and I was heartbroken for her and the things that they made her feel. And her relationship with Decker was always on thin ice (no pun intended) ever since her accident, but Delaney didn't realize for some time that it was the event that transpired between her and their friend Carson that had caused her rocky relationship with Decker. The two always seemed to be fighting their feelings for each other, afraid of wounding their pride or whatever. If they had only owned up to their feelings for each other in the beginning, they could have skipped a lot of heartbreak. But even through all of this Decker's love for her was completely unwavering and their friendship never truly faltered no matter what they were feeling for each other. They remained there for each other through it all. I really felt for Delaney throughout this entire book. She went through a lot of tragic events, most of which were completely out of her control but she was always the one blamed, causing most everyone to turn on her at some point. It was an intensely emotional read I didn't realize I was getting into until I was actually reading it. It was one of those books that I was dying to read and waited on for so long, and I have to say that I was not disappointed in the least.

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