Fracture by Megan Miranda (ARC)

Fracture
Megan Miranda

Synopsis: 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?

What would you do if you only had one day left to live?

I love books that I fly right through! Fracture started off right away with Delaney's fall through the ice and being saved eleven minutes later by her best friend Decker. She suffered permanent brain damage and wasn't expected to recover, but lo and behold, for some reason she does - though it turns out that her altered brain began to pick up on a new frequency. It takes her a few bodies to figure out why she feels tingles and an unatural pull towards certain people, but Delaney can now tell when someone is close to dying. The stronger the pull and more intense the tingles, the closer they are to passing away.

But there's something else strange about these deaths. Everytime she finds the person she's drawn to, nineteen year old coma survivor Troy seems to be within the vicinity as well. Too much to be considered coincidence, Troy is the only person Delaney is willing to confide in about her newfound ability (cause quite frankly, her family and personal relationships have all gone to crap since her almost-death). Delaney wants nothing more than to try to help those on death's doorstop defeat death. Troy thinks differently and sees the pull as a way to help those passing away by easing them through the process with minimal suffering. Naturally, Delaney and Troy butt heads each time a new individual appears on their death-dar, but it becomes a full-out battle when one of Delaney's own friends becomes the next possible victim.

Delaney may have been in the running for Valedictorian at her school but she wasn't that intelligent when it came to people and her newfound gift. I felt she should've figured out her death-dar and Troy's constant appearances a little sooner. And I felt she could've resolved a lot of issues with her best friend Decker if she had just opened up to him about her newfound gift, who was clearly the only person that wouldn't have strapped her in a straight jacket and thrown her in the booby hatch for admitting it.

Overall, I really liked Fracture. It was an easy, clean and engaging paranormal read that I finished almost instantaneously. There was a little romance but I wouldn't go so far as to categorize this as a romance. Fracture is definitely worth the read so go pick it up!

ARC provided by Bloomsbury Children's Books via NetGalley.