Fracture by Megan Miranda

Fracture by Megan Miranda

Release Date: January 17th 2012
Pages: 262
Format: E-galley
Source: NetGalley/Publisher
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Buy It: Book Depository

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. 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?

I went into reading Fracture hoping for one of those creepy paranormals, that don't revolve around creatures or immortal beings, and have mostly gotten pushed aside for star-crossed love stories. Plus it's a standalone novel, which is always nice. Miranda doesn't disappoint, but there were definitely some things about the novel that surprised me as well.

For one thing, even though I just said I wasn't looking for a love story, I have to admit that Decker is an incredibly swoon-worthy love interest. I even like the way Decker and Delaney sound together, I mean, why hadn't these two hooked up? Sigh. In Decker, Miranda's created an authentic but charming character, he might get mad, but you can't help loving him anyway.

Delaney, on the other hand, is a lot colder (no pun intended) emotionally, and because the story is told from her perspective, as a reader you get a lot of the creepiness that surrounds her experiences and her learning to understand what has happened. Still, I found her fairly easy to relate to, as she's conflicted between wanting to just accept the miracle that's happened, and wanting to understand it. I can imagine how difficult the kind of thing she went through would be for somebody scientifically minded, and I didn't blame her for trying to probe deeper, even as it put her– and others– in danger.

I was honestly not at all interested in Troy, and his entire storyline was the part of Fracture I found least compelling (especially its climax, though I won't give anything away, but I just didn't understand why he hadn't taken certain actions sooner since it didn't seem like the sort of thing that would just spontaneously happen). The romance between him and Delaney didn't warm me up to him either. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have missed him if it had just been Delaney figuring things out on her own, and it might have given the reader a chance to get to know her better, too.  I know Troy's not exactly the good guy in this novel, but he wasn't intriguingly bad either. He just didn't work for me as a reader.

Despite my reservations about Troy, overall I enjoyed Fracture, a dark thriller with a paranormal hint that enticed me to the last page with twists and turns.