Title: Fracture
Author: Megan Miranda
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: Worthy
Fracture is different from anything I've read in a while. Like Marissa Meyer, Megan Miranda follows her instinct instead of following the herd. Where she'll go with it remains to be seen, but it’s looking good so far! Also like Marissa Meyer, Megan Miranda has some word confusion going on. She doesn't, for example, understand the difference between illicit and elicit. This kind of thing makes me rather wonder where the editors are and what, exactly, they're doing to earn their pay. For that matter, where are the beta testers?! You may as well do it all yourself. Anyway, this is a very short book and readily readable, and the action (if you can call it that!) starts in pretty much right away. We start with Delaney, whose best friend is Decker, and her boyfriend is Carson.
Okay, I already have a problem with this! (You knew I would, didn’t you?!). Is there some rule in YA fiction which demands that you cook up bizarre and uncommon names for your characters and then try to portray those characters as your everyday common-or-garden people who just happen to wander into a freaky story?
As soon as I'd read each of those names, I was kicked right out of the fiction and back to the reality that I was reading YA fiction written by someone who is trying to cook up cool and distinctively pretentious names for her main characters, but for what purpose? They're either going to be memorable as written, or they're not. The name isn't going to make a damned bit of difference to how memorable, lovable, or lovably hatable they are! Maybe others will not feel so disrupted by this, but this glares out at me, and I think it's probably another good guideline for writing: don’t use asinine names! If your characters need exotic names for no other reason than to be memorable, you ain't doin' yer job of writing those characters!
Apart from that, the story is good so far. There's no prologue - which is always a big plus with me, and I love that Megan Miranda is a scientist by profession (although evidently not a practicing one). She gets us right away into Delaney's trip across the ice, through which she falls, and is out of it for eleven minutes (before Decker pulls her out). Delaney is unconscious for six days and then snaps right out of it. MRI shows some dead tissue in her brain, but she has no deficits: no memory loss, no loss of motor function, no issues. Her only problem is that someone comes into her room one night and cuts a vein in her elbow. Or did she do it to herself and imagine the rest? Fortunately, Delaney's predicament is discovered and taken care of before she dies again! After that, she's home quite quickly - rather too quickly for someone who's been cut open after being laid out flat for six straight days feeding from a tube, but we’ll let that go.
This story is told in first person which I actually have a problem with (although I use that in Timeless - the novel that won't let me finish it!), because it always strikes me as being so fake if you think about it. What - did she take notes and write this up each day?! How does she recall these conversations and activities down to the last detail? If the novel was actually being dictated as it happened - to a recorder or a video camera - that might be one thing, but to baldly put it out there as is really removes somewhat my suspension of disbelief. I have to keep forcing myself back into it. But maybe that's just me; I guess the thing is not to think about it, huh?!
The thing about Delaney's recovery is that she now feels some sort of pull towards those who are about to die. She experiences this twice in the first few days of her recovery: once in the hospital and once with an aging neighbor down the street from her house, but unlike us readers, she doesn't put two and two together. The incident with the neighbor is rather creepy because Delaney is woken in the middle of the night and sees a moving shadow at her neighbor's house, which is what triggers her to simply wander down there in the cold (it’s December and it’s up north in the USA). There is definitely a shadowy someone there who is just keeping too far ahead of Delaney for her to get a good look at him (or her). Or is she imagining this, too?
Shortly, she's back at school, finishing up her classes and taking her exams, and planning on going to the traditional winter party (which hopefully won't be held on ice!) and to which she's never been before. In a study session with friend Janna in the tiny local library, she meets a guy called Troy Varga. Again, like Carson, and like Decker, he's a stereotype, which Miranda evidently thinks she's successfully disguised by giving him crooked teeth, but he's the standard sterotype with all the appropriate musculature, and the absolutely inescapably invitable hair failing into his eyes. Excuse me whilst I barf voluminously.
Troy tells Delaney that he recognizes her from the account in the newspaper, which Janna later informs her is a lie because there was no such account. Delaney gets his phone number. He tells her that he works in the local nursing home and is studying comas. I suspect he will be the one to feed her information about whence her new super powers have been derived. Delaney also discovers that her mother has lied to her about her dead maternal grandparents. They're not dead, just like Delaney. I suspect we'll be seeing her taking a trip to visit with them before too long - a trip which will doubtlessly be quite revealing!
So Delaney goes to the party and discovers Decker kissing her arch rival Tara, and like a thirteen year old, storms out of the house in a tantrum into the snow. She wanders blindly homeward-bound, but gets pulled towards a house where an old guy is dying. She meets Troy there and he takes her to his apartment where they kiss, then he takes her home. She starts casually seeing Troy, visiting him at the assisted living facility where he works, but she learns there is a darker side to him: he's using the assisted living facility to assist dying, without getting the patient's permission first. He doesn’t so much kill them as fails to prolong their life at every opportunity. He's not cruel, just callous. Except that he was the one in the hospital cutting Delaney's vein that night after she recovered from her coma.
It turns out that Troy is a survivor like Delaney, but he's bitter about it: he lost his sister and parents in a most horrible way in an accident where he was trapped in the car for some considerable time watching his sister die and unable to help. Now he "helps' by expediting the departure of others. This somehow doesn’t stop Delaney form hanging with him from time to time!
When Delaney goes to meet her friend and rival for valedictorian, Janna and her bro Carson at the local pizza place to celebrate their exam results, Delaney gets the vibe from Carson, so she decides to hang with him for the rest of the day in order to help him cheat death. When the vibe she's getting grows stronger, she urgently drives him to the doctor's office, but he's seizing before she can get there, and he dies in her arms before the ambulance can arrive. She's broken by this of course - that is more broken than she already was.
Her mom begins forcing her to take the meds which she had previously been secretly flushing down the toilet. She visits her doctor again and she learns from him that the boy she made a scene about in his office a week or two before actually didn’t die - he was saved. But she can’t find out where he is now. The doctor gives her mom a card advising her to get help from another source. She never does - not in the scope of this novel anyway. She goes to Carson's funeral and is all but assaulted by his sister who eviendely seems to think she kilel dhim. That isn't resolved within the scope of this novel.
It rather fizzles towards the end, with Troy killing himself in the same lake in which Delaney fell, and she resolves to embrace life with Decker. The ending is way trite, but I am still going to worthy this one because it's a worthy effort and it has so much going for it: it just didn't go far enough. Miranda has a "companion" novel to this called Veangeance and another novel called "Hysteria" but I'm not feeling much inclined to read those - not in the forseeable future anyway.
