A Review of Fracture: Debut Novel from Megan Miranda

By the time Delaney Maxwell was pulled from a Maine lake’s icy waters by her best friend Decker Phillips, her heart has stopped beating. Her brain had stopped working. She was dead. But somehow Delaney survived – despite the brain scans that show irreparable damage. Everyone wants Delaney to be fine, but she knows she’s far from normal. Pulled by strange sensations she can’t control or explain, Delaney now finds herself drawn to the dying, and when she meets Troy Varga, a boy who recently emerged from a coma with the same abilities, she is relieved to share this strange new existence. Unsure if her altered brain is predicting death or causing it, Delaney must figure out if their gift is a miracle, a freak of nature – or something much more frightening…..

As soon as I read that Fracture was a debut novel from a Biology major that formerly worked in biotech, I knew I had to read it. I love the supernatural and the paranormal, but science definitely has a place in my heart and its inclusion in Fracture’s plot made it sound intriguing to me. Plus this was author Megan Miranda’s debut novel and I try to read debuts since I hope to become published one day myself.

Fracture begins almost immediately with the key plot point. Delaney Maxwell and Decker Phillips venture out onto the lake, against Delaney’s better judgment, to avoid taking the long way around to meet up with their friends. Delaney falls, the ice cracks, and she plunges in, trapped for eleven minutes before she is rescued. And oh yeah, during that eleven minutes, she dies. The next time she wakes up, it’s nearly a week later and the doctors can barely understand how she is even alive, let alone coherent. Her best friend, the trusty Decker, has been there at her bedside the whole time.

When Delaney goes home, she begins having these strange sensations within her brain that seem to become stronger when she is around someone who is close to death. She also comes across Troy Varga, a boy who has survived a similar traumatic accident with coma, and experiences these strange sensations too. Troy is a breath of fresh air at first, someone who can relate to what has happened to Delaney, especially as she discovers that her friends and family are not dealing with it so well. Troy is more than he seems at first, though, as Delaney quickly discovers. Ultimately, she wonders if she is just sensing these deaths or if she has become so wrong in the head that she is actually causing them.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story that hasn’t already been offered through other sources, but I would like to say that the best part of Fracture for me was its character development and emotional ride. I found the emotions Delaney’s friends, and especially her mother, were dealing with – emotions that were not always kind and supportive – to be quite believable. The lines that best summed up this point for me were, “He dragged me through the house, and I let him, because I wasn’t sure who I was most scared of at the moment. The stranger I was learning about too quickly, or the woman I’d known my entire life who was quickly becoming a stranger.” I also liked the Decker storyline, as I think it reminds us that sometimes you don’t realize what you have until it’s almost (or is) gone.

The only part that fell short for me was the actual plot. I would say that 90% of the books I read are some type of Urban Fantasy or have an otherwise Supernaturally-based plot, but I felt as though this one could have done without that paranormal twist. This would have been a five star story for me if it had just been a girl that came out of a traumatic accident alive, and was forced to deal with her changing relationships. The paranormal element cheapened that slightly, and also tried to wrap up too quickly. I think if it had been drawn out or if it had reached a more sensational climax, it would have worked. That said, I liked the ending as part of a non-paranormal story, and I thought it made sense.

Overall, I felt Fracture was an interesting and enjoyable read. I would give it four and a half stars based on its writing and character development alone. I look forward to reading more novels from Megan Miranda.