Fracture by Megan Miranda

by:  Megan Miranda
published by:  Walker and Co.
publish date:  January 17, 2012

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?

This book ended up taking a bizarre little path I wasn't expecting.  That's not to say it was a bad thing, because I found this book really impossible to put down.  Fracture is a dark story, but it pulls you under and holds you to the end.

Delaney was an interesting character.  I liked her.  I was appropriately frustrated with the relationship between Delaney and Decker.  I felt like there wasn't enough explanation about what was going on with her brain injury.  There was, but maybe I'm spoiled by books like Left Neglected by Lisa Genova that give detailed information.

Overall, I thought this was a good YA book.  Maybe not for the youngest YA readers, there's a few mentions of sex and language.  Nothing horribly bad, but not something you might want to hand like a 12 year old.  Couple that with the dark feel of the book, I think it's for the older YAs.