Fracture by Megan Miranda – No, you shouldn’t need a sequel.

Fracture by Megan Miranda
Release Date: January 17, 2012
Source: Purchased
Order: Powell’s  ||   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. 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. –Goodreads

In a nutshell: Girl dies. Girl lives. Girl sees dead dying people.

Main Character: I don’t know who the hell Delaney Maxwell even is. She falls on the ice and almost dies. She supposedly should have died but doesn’t. She’s in a coma for a week and the novel begins when she wakes up. This is a bit of a spoiler because it takes her about the first third of the book to figure out what’s going on, exactly, but she is, for some reason, now drawn to people who are dying.

So that’s what happens to her. As for who she actually is? I want so badly to like her; she’s mega studious and when she wakes up, her primary life concern is how her week of being in a coma will affect her shot at valedictorian. High five for girls who care about school! Unfortunately, I don’t think I ever learned anything else about her. She’s studious. She has this weird power-sense thing. And that’s about it. This is on my short list of Major YA Annoyances (not to be confused with my incredibly long list of Other YA Annoyances): a first-person story where, in spite of spending the entire book in the character’s head, we learn relatively little about who the character is as a person. This book has potential, but is ultimately less than it could be for the simple reason that I couldn’t develop an attachment to her.

Love Interest? There are several love interests here, which I liked. She has three dramatically different “relationships.” They balance each other out nicely. One is deliberately kind of a throw-away, and is only significant as another point of comparison for the two seriously considered romances. Also, one of the three is mega creepy. Like, Christian Grey creep levels.

Unrelated to Delaney, I adored Decker. He was just precious. He’s also probably the most developed character in this book, not that this is saying all that much because every character in this novel suffers from inadequate development. (Funny, because the last YA novel I read before this was annoying because it was like 500 pages of character sketch and about 100 pages of plot thrown in throughout the book. I JUST CAN’T WIN!)

Supporting Character Racism? No, just exclusion; I’m fairly certain that everyone in this book is white, though it’s not really discussed.

Negligent Parents? No. Delaney complains about her parents quite a bit and mom is a tad overbearing due to her daughter having recently been dead, in a coma, and then prescribed crazy pills. Joyce Summers could learn a little something from her about how to parent a recently dead daughter.

Ho Suspension? Ho detentions. The aforementioned throw-away “love interest” was a party hookup on her best friend’s couch. If I recall correctly, it was PG-13, though. She shares a bed in a fairly chaste-though-not-platonic way with one of the others. Her biggest ho suspension would be sneaking off to the apartment of her slightly-older-no-longer-in-high-school love interest. They make out and she shuts it down before it gets too serious.

I have issues with this category, actually, because it feels like slut-shaming. I mean, really, the girl does nothing wrong and we’re just trying to alert you to the degree to which things get physical with the love interests. But Jessica Wakefield and her ho suspensions are too good a blog theme for us to ignore. I’M CONFLICTED. #bloggerproblems

ETA: Lor and I have a totes legit conversation about this section of the review in the comments, wherein I amend my stance on this issue.

A+: There is really thoughtful conversation about euthanasia happening here, particularly throughout the second half of the book. Miranda takes a pretty clear stance on that issue, so the conversation could have been more balanced, but it’s still compelling.

Fail: The fact that I still don’t know who Delaney is. Also, the fact that the source of her weird power-sense-thing is never adequately explained. According to Goodreads there is maybe going to be a sequel? That annoys me a lot.

The End: Decent, though a bit hasty. It happened way too quickly, and I hate that the power wasn’t resolved in any real way. The book isn’t that long, so there was room to flesh out some of the ultra-quick ending and maybe add more, throughout, to build towards the explanation of her little power.

And so: I am seriously annoyed that there will be a sequel. As I write this, I am having a Goodreads conversation with a friend about the last book that I read, and how frustrating it is for authors to deliberately not resolve a novel for the sake of a sequel. That is exactly what happened here, and it’s obnoxious.

Final Grade: C

Nicole Sweeney (all posts)

Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.