Release Date: 17th January, 2012Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 262pgs
The Story
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. Every one 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 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.
The Review
A big thanks to Sonia from Bloomsbury for sending me a review copy of this book!
When seventeen-year-old Delaney Maxwell falls through the ice and is submerged under deadly waters, everyone in the town thought she was dead and technically she was. For about eleven minutes. But as if fate gave her a second chance at life with those exact eleven minutes, Delaney wakes up from her week-long coma and not only do her loved ones - her parents, her friends, and even Decker who is her best friend in the whole wide world - have changed from her accident . . . but Delaney herself has changed as well - for better and for worse. And when she meets a new boy in town and sees things normal people cannot see, she'll soon be tested both with love and death, and a little something inbetween.
When I started this book, the first line I read was, "The first time I died, I didn't see God." If that didn't get your attention, I don't know what will. Now speaking of the first line, I absolutely loved the intensity of when Delaney is pulled underwater. To know she was going to die. To know the water was going to take over her entire body. But what I liked even more was how real the scene felt to me - as if I was there underwater with her - but it was also something that just cut to the chase and I love those sort of beginnings in novels. Something that just hits you with a bam rather than fluff around with unnecessary plot fill-ins. But with that being said, the only thing that fell flat for me was the characters and the mystery behind the storyline.
Delaney was a likable enough main heroine. She loved her family, her friends and basically anyone else who was about to be put in harm's way, and she was a teenage with plenty of realism added to her character depth. But she still possessed some unlikable qualities too. She can be a little selfish, a little bit of a mess, a little bit naive when the signs were clear enough to tell you someone was going to be trouble to begin with. However when it comes down to it, what made her standout and what made me like her even more was when she was with her bestfriend, Decker. Now there's a boy I didn't mind. Sure he may not have been the greatest sport of all fictional boys and might've done some silly things in his past, but to me, he brought out the best in Delaney . . . even if she didn't know it at the time. Now if only Delaney was aware of his feelings sooner in the novel! I just wanted them to kill already!!!! Anyway, you should know I'm always a sucker when it comes best friend romances. I can't help but love them.
But despite those little flaws in the two main characters, the character who really brought the story down was the new guy, Troy Varga. I just couldn't - at all - connect to him but the saddest thing was . . . I hated him. From the moment I met this creepy fella, there was just something about him I didn't like and for some reason he gave off the vibe of already being trouble, leading to me not caring about him nor what happens to his character. And then there's the mystery itself weaved in with Troy's character, which was also a disappointment. I was hoping for a catch-the-killer type of mystery and ending, where I see things that I don't see coming, but unfortunately I didn't get either of those elements. Anyway, while I would've liked more of a shocker mystery, a neater ending and something a little less-predictable, but the author still did a pretty good job in entertaining me and making me turn those pages to find out more!
Overall, I thought Megan Miranda's debut novel was a really good novel. It may not have been my favourite of all favourites in the young adult mystery genre, but it's definitely something you need to read at least once in your life. Suspenseful, engaging, fast-paced, and equally as brilliant as the likes of Kimberly Derting's The Body Finder and Laurie Faria Stolarz's Touch series , FRACTURE will have you hooked from the very beginning. Even in those icy cold waters that pulls Delaney under . . . because eleven minutes could - and will - change everything!
The Rating
3 1/2 / 5 stars 
