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.

Blog Tour: Left Neglected

by:  Lisa Genova

published by:  Gallery Books

Sarah Nickerson, like any other working mom, is busy trying to have it all. One morning while racing to work and distracted by her cell phone, she looks away from the road for one second too long. In that blink of an eye, all the rapidly moving parts of her over-scheduled life come to a screeching halt. After a brain injury steals her awareness of everything on her left side, Sarah must retrain her mind to perceive the world as a whole. In so doing, she also learns how to pay attention to the people and parts of her life that matter most.

Sarah Nickerson isn't like any other working mom.  Sarah is an overachiever.  She works like 80 hours a week and has a nanny and has to multi-task from 5 am to 11 pm to make it through her day.  She has a high profile job that is front and center of her life.  It isn't until she gets into a car accident because of that multi-tasking that her life changes drastically.

As a mom, I had a hard time with Sarah.  Yes, I wanted to praise her as a woman, but as a mom I wanted to slap her up side the head.  After she got in the accident and she suffers from a brain injury and a condition known as Left Neglect she got her priorities straight.  I found the concept of Left Neglect to be fascinating.  There was one point when she was frustrated with her husband and she had him describe the whole room to him so he did and then she asked him to describe the other half and he's like there is no other half, I think it help him and the reader understand what it was like.

Overall I thought this was a good book.  At times I thought it got a little slow, but in the end it was worth it.