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. 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?
I originally picked up Fracture on impluse at my local library. The cover jumped out at me. After reading the description, I put it back on the shelf. Another paranormal love triangle, no thanks. Something made me pick it back up on my way out.
And I'm really glad I did.
This is a book that I wasn't sure if I loved or hated or was scared of until I was finished with it. I didn't know if I liked or disliked the characters until I had completed their journey with them. If you look on my goodreads updates as I was reading this, a lot of it is me wailing about the characters I didn't like, or the ones I cared about making poor decisions.
But I think I misjudged this book. I misjudged the characters. If I hadn't gone into it thinking it was just another paranormal, that there was one scary guy and one good one, and a hapless girl in between - if I had begun with no expectations, I would have been pleasantly surprised.
This is a book that asks a lot of questions, both of its characters and its readers. How far would you go to save someone you love? How far is too far? What is fate and do we choose it ourselves? What does love look like, what does caring look like? In the face of extraordinary circumstances, how do we choose empathy?
The dynamics between Delaney and her parents are richly explored, in a way that I'm unaccustomed to reading in YA lit. As Delaney learns more about her mother's childhood, she grows closer to her, but not in the way you'd think. Delaney's relationship with Decker is natural, not forced. It's stunted and awkward but sort of perfect in its imperfections. Her way of relating to her larger circle of friends was at first off-putting, but as it goes on it becomes apparent why she acts that way.
Troy is a character who pops up with the same ability as Delaney's. I don't want to say too much about him, but I will say that their relationship trod a very fine line for me. But for once, I think the author did it right and I respect the way Miranda portrayed him in the end.
In a sense, this is a book about relationships, and a stressful event that shatters the quiet, forcing those relationships to shift and mold. The paranormal aspect is treated more as a scientific experience, combined a little bit with the supernatural. The relationships between Delaney and her family and friends are what kept me reading, though. That, and the rich yet sparse poetic way of describing things that Miranda has. Her writing is chillingly beautiful, and I'm very excited to see what she comes up with next.
I'm giving this one four out of five stars, simply because there were some signs that this was a first novel and also because I wasn't quite satisfied with the tendency toward abuse in one of the relationships portrayed, in that, the author didn't make it clear enough for my liking that this was a bad thing. I understand that it's portrayed as Delaney sees it, but that didn't fix it entirely for me.
I'll be picking up the sequel in 2014.
- Fire
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