Wistful Wednesday

Review: Fracture by Megan Miranda

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.

What I Tought:

I'm not sure how I feel about this story. From the blurb above, I expected a story wioth more of a paranormal twist, but that aspect of the story was played down to the point of virtual nonexistence. I also expected more action, but there was very little to speak of. Instead, this was a study of human nature and how that drives the characters actions. Now thiere's nothing wrong with that - I enjoy a good character study - but this was just...depressing.

The overpowering theme of this story is death. It begins with the main character, Delaney, nearly dying in an accident on a frozen lake and when she awakes from a coma no one beleived she'd survive, she is obsessed with death. She is drawn to the rooms of other patients who are dying and when she leaves the hospital, she is drawn to the homes of people who are dying. And the way it is described is kind of creepy, but it's part of Delaney's new existence, so I went with it. Now here I thought more could be done with this aspect of the story, but it isn't. (Spoiler Alert) This new "ability" is never really explained or utilized. it just kind of...is, which left me unsastisfied. I like to know the why of things and since I didn't get an answer in this case, I was left feeling empty.

Still, I kept reading because I hoped maybe some of my questions would be answered. Like what was the purpose of Delaney's new abilities? What is going on between her and her best friend Decker - who happened to be the one who saved her from the lake - why is he so devoted to her, but she's ambivalent to him? And why is she obsessed with death? Rather than get these answers, I only got more questions.

To complicate matters more, in comes a character named Troy, who has the same abilities as Delaney. In fact, whenever she shows up where someone's dying, he's there first. Now from the blurb, I kind of expected more from the relationship between delaney and Troy, but once again, I was disappointed. I won't give it away, but their relationship was not what I thought it was going to be. And I think that sums up my entire opinion of this book: It was not what I expected it to be. The writing was fine, the premise unique, but I think it failed to deliver on its promise - at least for me.