Author: Megan Miranda
Publisher: Walker & Company
ISBN: 978-0-8027-2309-3
Release Date: January 3, 2012
Page Number: 272
Price: $17.99/21.00 Can."I didn't have the presence of mind to think, Please God, don't let me die. I wasn't brave enough to think, I hope Decker stayed back. My only thought, playing on a repetitive loop, was No, no, no, no, no."
It was a cold winter day in Maine when Delaney followed her friend, Decker, onto the ice on their way to a game with friends. It was just as cold when Delaney slipped, falling onto the ice hard enough to shatter it and send her down into the ice topped water. For 11 minutes, Delaney stays underwater until Decker can pull her out. By all rights, she should be brain dead if not dead entirely. Instead she's perfectly okay, needing only a day or two to get ahold of herself before she's ready to leave, feeling almost just like before. Almost, because she still feels this odd pull, an itch, that pulls her into a woman's room just as the woman begins to convulse in death throes.
Fracture was one of the many ARCs I found at Book Expo America. The ARC has a limited cover design consisting of black text on blue, with no pictures in the design to suggest what the novel is about. Regardless, the short passage from the novel on the back and the summary on the info page, which suggested Delaney's connection with the dead, led me to think that Fracture was going to be one of the best books I'd picked up. I wasn't even home yet before I gave into the temptation to read it.
I was hooked within the first two pages of the story. The story starts with Delaney's death experience and hospital recovery, spoken in Delaney's voice. It's dramatic without being too much, and sets a good tone for the rest of the novel. Miranda is particularly talented at descriptive writing; I reread the drowning scene, for instance, several times just because I enjoyed the way her writing flows.
Sadly for a book with such a promising beginning, after a few chapters the story begins to drag. This is mostly because the point of the novel stops being about Delaney's ability to sense death, and more and more about her boy problems. Delaney's power, while still being present in the story, became more of a plot device to introduce a secondary love interest and connect him to Delaney. Her ability still plays a part, but the novel becomes less of an interesting fantasy about a girl who can sense death and more about a teenage girl with boy problems, and because the character relationships are more given than explained for most of the characters, I didn't feel enough of a connection to find the romance more than just something I had to drag through in order to finish the story.
All in all, Fracture was an alright book. It was far from amazing, and I feel it would have been better with less emphasis on the romance, but it was still an okay read. That was the only major flaw I could find in the story, and like I said, I loved the author's writing style in the beginning. Should the author end up writing another novel, I would probably check it out.
As far as Fracture goes, I'd recommend it to the sort who enjoy teenage romance and drama. Fracture wasn't really my sort of thing after all, but for someone who enjoys teen romance, I'd suggest picking it up when it comes out January 3, 2012.
Join me soon, readers, and I'll be reviewing Ariel Tachna's The Inventor's Companion, a vaguely steampunk novel about the forbidden love between two men from very different castes in a twisted society where status determines everything.
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