Author: Megan Miranda
Publisher: Walker Childrens
Print Date: January 17, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0802723093

Fracture cover blurb:

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.

Fracture by Megan Miranda, is a wonderful  young adult novel novel that adeptly combines Miranda’s scientific education in the fields of biology and anthropology with her ability to tell a good story. The plot and characters are very strong, the pacing is good, and it’ll keep you turning pages until there is nothing left to turn.

Delaney Maxwell is an average teenage girl who struggles to come to terms with her near death experience after waking from a coma with brain injuries that show up on a scan, but don’t seem to be affecting her ability to function normally. It’s not long before she realizes that she came back “different,” and there is no one for her to talk to who would understand or believe what she was experiencing.

Fracture does a wonderful job of tapping into the trials of being a teen and doing it in a very realistic way that keeps you solidly on Delaney’s side as she comes to terms with her unique situation. One of the best things about Fracture is how well it illustrates the emotions that teens feels and how isolated they feel from their loved ones and friends–especially when something serious is happening.

Throughout the novel you can’t help but to empathize with Delaney and her situation, but there’s also a part of you screaming at her to “tell someone the truth.” Yet, Miranda tells the story in such a way that it feels completely believable that Delaney would bottle up her emotions, desperate to be normal and to find her own way through the mess that has become her life.  As a result of her secrets, she begins acting erratically causing those around her to worry that she’s not as well recovered from her accident as they had hoped.

Fracture is a young adult book that treats teens and their issues seriously, even if it is done through events that step beyond the realm of the ordinary. Sometimes it takes an extraordinary event to make us realize that we’re not alone and that there are people who are willing to put themselves on the line for us.

Special thanks to the publisher for providing this book for review.