Fracture by Megan Miranda

Title: Fracture

Author: Megan Miranda

Publisher: Walker & Company

Publication Date: January 17, 2012

My Rating:

From 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. 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?

My Review:

“If you had one day left to live, what would you do?”

With this book came some pretty high expectations. Many of my friends had read and generously rated this book, so  I am very happy to report that Fracture more than lived up to those expectations, and, at times, exceeded them.

Delaney died. She was dead for eleven minutes. People don’t come back after that much time has passed... but Delaney did. The question is, did she come back different?

This is such a dark subject matter, so I really admired that the author was able to infuse the story with the humor she did. She had me laughing at several points during the book:

“I wasn't athletic and had no desire to work out, so I watched what I ate. Correction: I ate what I wanted and felt guilty about it later.”

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“I’d heard girls in the locker room not so discreetly whisper that I had gotten fat, but I had also heard guys not so discreetly whisper that I had gotten hot. It’s a fine line.”

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“‘Don’t look at me like that. I tried nice. Nice made me puke.’”

This book contains a lot of my guilty pleasures: There's the friendship between characters that hints at something more.  The character I struggled with, constantly changing my mind whether he was a good guy or not, and trying to decide whether I loved or hated him.  And of course, every high school has a mean girl.  Fracture has a great one - one that I had no trouble deciding whether I loved or hated. Hint:  It wasn't love.

Megan Miranda has such a way with words and uses them to paint the most incredible pictures in my imagination. Here's one of my favorite quotes:

“I hadn't known that a light could be a feeling and a sound could be a color and a kiss could be both a question and an answer. And that heaven could be the ocean or a person or this moment or something else entirely.”

I love that this story is so unique. Now, I know several blogger friends who disagree with me on that point, and have recommended a particular book to me due to a similar story line. Having never read that specific book or anything remotely close to it, I stand by my statement that Fracture is unique to me. I found it to be refreshing, and, honestly, I couldn’t put it down, so, I was thrilled to find out I only had to pay with a tweet or Facebook post to receive “Eleven Minutes,” a short story from Decker’s POV. You can do the same here: Eleven Minutes

Another favorite thing about Fracture? It’s a stand-alone book. I love several book series and trilogies, but I have grown so tired of cliffhangers and waiting a year to find out what happens to my favorite characters. It is so fulfilling and rewarding to have a complete and final story in one book. I really wish there were more stand-alone books being written.

I think Megan Miranda’s debut book was a home-run, and I look forward to reading her future work.