Review : Fracture by Megan Miranda

Summary (from Goodreads)

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? 

Personal Thoughts

When I first started Fracture, I had high hopes. I honestly wanted to really like this book. On top of that I was impatiently waiting for it's release because the premise of the book sounded so interesting.
Unfortunately, the book just wasn't for me.

The book is told in the POV of Delaney, who is the main character. At the start of the book, Delaney falls through the ice at a lake and stays in the water for 11 long minutes before her best friend, Decker, pulls her out. Delaney survives and wakes up from a coma later on. She discovers that she can somehow sense the death of people.
One of the aspect that I look for in a book is a connection with the main character. I need to be able to relate to or understand her to like a book. This was not the case in this book. I found Delaney to be unlikable and unsympathetic. To sum up, she was difficult to relate to.
Many of her actions startled me. For instance, after she returns home from the hospital, her friends come to pay her a visit and she is very rude to them although these very people also came to visit her when she was in a coma.
Even her attitude towards Decker isn't very nice.
I tried really hard to try to understand Delaney's state of mind, but somehow I just couldn't.
Overall, Delaney was the kind of character I didn't enjoy.

Troy is another character who seems to be very important to the development of the story. However, we don't learn much about him. I just felt that he was a little underdeveloped. Moreover, Delaney's behavior towards him was puzzling. She is at times terrified of him but at times she also feels a deep connection to him. Also, the scene at the end involving him was a bit of mystery and I have yet to understand it.

The secondary characters in the book were not very complex according to me apart from her parents. I didn't feel anything for them, although I really wanted to. I found them to be confusing and baffling. The secondary characters include Decker, Delaney's parents and some of her friends.

There was a romance in this book but like everything else I didn't like it very much. First you have Delaney and Decker. They have been best friends forever, but turns out they love each other. Delaney was very selfish when it came to Decker. He turns to a girl named Tara after Delaney comes out of coma and when Delaney comes across them making out, she feels extremely jealous and runs off although she and Decker weren't going out or anything.
You also have the Delaney and Troy relationship, which according to me was not very romantic.
According to me, the romance in Fracture was disappointing.

To be honest, the plot sounded really intriguing and it was very promising. However, the author does not really advance the plot. I felt like there was basically no plot. This made the book very boring.
Moreover, a lot of things remain unexplained and I didn't like that.
Megan Miranda is a good writer. She is very good at explaining the psychological aspects. The neuroscience part were probably the most interesting part of this book.
In my opinion, this book could have been a smashing hit if it had better characterization and a better plot.

Overall, I wasn't fascinated by this book as much as I wanted to. It was unsatisfying and confusing and I wanted it to be mesmerizing and mind-blowing.

Rating

Cover : 4/5
Plot: 2/5
Characters : 1/5
Writing : 2/5