Fracture by Megan Miranda
Young Adult
ARC (Release Date: January 17th, 2012)
Walker Books for Young Readers
272 pages
Summary from Amazon:
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.
Review:
That is the summary of the book, but here is the excerpt on the back:
A lot can happen in eleven minutes.
Decker can run two miles easily in eleven minutes. I once wrote an English essay in ten. No lie. And God knows Carson Levine can talk a girl out of her clothes in half that time.
Eleven minutes might as well be eternity under water. It only takes three minutes without air for loss of consciousness. Permanent brain damage begins at four minutes. And then, when the oxygen runs out, full cardiac arrest occurs. Death is possible at five minutes. Probable at seven. Definite at ten.
Decker pulled me out at eleven.
Now just try to tell me that the last line of that excerpt doesn't give you chills. That paragraph is what made me want to read this book so badly, and Fracture did not let my expectations down. This is a book about a girl who should be dead and as a result has been given this ability that is something between a gift and a curse. It is about the way her near death has turned her family inside out, and the way in which she has to put it back together. It is about who you should trust and who you shouldn't and how the line is so thin. It is about an equally thin line, this time between friendship and love. Most of all, it's about the way in which Delaney has to come to terms with the reasons for why she lived, was given her strange ability, and was able to find love right in front of her. One of my other favorite passages from the book was this:
Funny how everything can change in an instant. From death to life. From empty to full. From darkness to light.
Or maybe I just wasn't looking. I hadn't known that a light could be a feeling and a sound could by 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 get chills reading that one as well. Overall I think this book is everything I had hoped it would be. Delaney was a fantastic narrator. But more than that, Megan Miranda has a wonderful way with words. A way that can hook you and draw you in, that gives you goose bumps, and that perfectly straddled the line between scientific and emotional. It was the kind of book where I found myself skimming ahead because I just could't WAIT to find out what happened next. Fracture is most definitely a book to watch out for.
