[Review] Fracture by Megan Miranda

Miranda, Megan.  Fracture.  Walker, 2012. 9780802723093.  In this first book by Megan Miranda.  I initially felt as if the story was dealing with the supernatural, but soon found it to be more of a romantic thriller type story whose main character, 17 year old Delaney Maxwell, falls into a frozen lake not to be rescued for eleven minutes.  Delaney doesn’t wake up for six days, and almost didn’t make it to that point, because someone entered  Delaney’s hospital room and tried to kill her.  No one in the small Maine hospital where  can understand her attempts at trying to tell them there’s a person running around in nurse scrubs trying to kill patients.  So Delaney keeps it to herself, not even sharing it with her best friend and boy next door Decker,  who has spent every day at her bedside since rescuing her from the ice break.

The pressure of Deckers guilt over blaming himself for the accident puts a huge dent in his relationship with Delaney, which causes the couple that has known each other their whole life to split up and turn to other folks without ironing out their unresolved feelings.  When Decker becomes  involved with a “mean girl” type to find comfort, Delaney turns to Troy Varga, a 19 year old that shares the same  death prediction symdrom present in Delaney.  Delaney eventually finds out that Troy is the myterious person in scrubs who tried to kill her.  For Troy, this was not attempted murder, however.  This was jos way of helping to ease her towards death, a practice he has carried out with other victims since developing the strange sensory perception for death.  Delaney, on the other hand, pulls the cape off Troy’s Superman when she chooses  the opposite approach to ease the last days and hours for the people by asking them the question, ‘If this was the last day of your life, what would you do?”  When the people give her the answer as to what they would do, she encourages them to go out and do it.

With Delaney keeping closed mouth about what is going on with her and the new skill at detecting death, she begans a slow pull away from her parents, becoming more independent.  This new independent attitude makes her mother feel that she is losing control of her daughter and life and starts making attempts at drugging Delaney with sedatives. More problems with the mother surface, due to Mrs. Maxwell’s dysfunctional teen years, causing the mother to withdraw into herself and leaving Delaney with no one to confide in or simply talk to.  There are a few  bogged down  pity party moments, but enough suspense to keep you reading to the end.  The climatic moment of the book really jerked me around, forcing me to reread it to make sure I was reading the correct sequence of events.   I also feel that even though the characters range in age from 17 to 19 years, old,  it can be placed in a middle school library because there are absolutely no explicit scenes.