Megan Miranda
Release date: January 17th, 2012
by Walker Books for Young Readers
Goodreads / Purchase
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?
*A copy was provided by Bloomsbury Publishing for review purposes*
Delaney
died, for 11 minutes she was under freezing water. Miraculously, she
survived but now she can sense when someone is going to die. This
concept is definitely intriguing. It was even moreso for me, who hadn't
read the blurb in months and had no idea what I was getting into. Going
in blind made Delaney's ability as much a mystery to me as it was to
her. It was a lot of fun simply going with the flow - not knowing more
than the characters for once.
Delaney is a tough character to swallow. She can be a bit dramatic, sometimes cold. She reacts so suddenly to situations that a few times I thought I had missed something. I didn't particularly understand her enough to say I liked her or disliked her. She's just floating in between. I particularly didn't like how she leads Decker on, but then gets mad at him for finding someone else. Or how she was deathly scared of Troy one minute (which, to me, seemed strange and sudden), but the next she was off to find him. What about this Troy? Him, I liked. He's sexy, charming, confusing, fearsome : he's one deep character. I loved the part that he played in the story. Even though his actions can be predictable, he has a strong, fierce personality that is perfect for the tone of the book. To put it bluntly - he's a crazy mofo!
One thing that I have to applaud is the writing. I loved how the complexity of the human mind was depicted. It's easy for the reader to see that Troy is mentally unhealthy. Whether it's because of his ability or his coma, his mental state of mind is unsettling. His character is very intense: You can feel how unstable he is and fear him for it. Though not just Troy, the whole plot has a very "touch it and it may shatter" feel to it, mostly due to the deep, even sophisticated prose. The genre itself, however, is very obscure. Subplots encompass many genres without focusing on one in particular: Thriller, romance, paranormal, mystery. I felt disoriented by this, not being sure where the story was going to go next. I feel like the book had a lot more potential- if it was simply more focused. In the end, however, I can say that I truly did enjoy the book overall. I love mysteries, and this one was a fun, deep and disturbing story. I wish things ended more resolved, but all in all I was satisfied with it.
Delaney is a tough character to swallow. She can be a bit dramatic, sometimes cold. She reacts so suddenly to situations that a few times I thought I had missed something. I didn't particularly understand her enough to say I liked her or disliked her. She's just floating in between. I particularly didn't like how she leads Decker on, but then gets mad at him for finding someone else. Or how she was deathly scared of Troy one minute (which, to me, seemed strange and sudden), but the next she was off to find him. What about this Troy? Him, I liked. He's sexy, charming, confusing, fearsome : he's one deep character. I loved the part that he played in the story. Even though his actions can be predictable, he has a strong, fierce personality that is perfect for the tone of the book. To put it bluntly - he's a crazy mofo!
One thing that I have to applaud is the writing. I loved how the complexity of the human mind was depicted. It's easy for the reader to see that Troy is mentally unhealthy. Whether it's because of his ability or his coma, his mental state of mind is unsettling. His character is very intense: You can feel how unstable he is and fear him for it. Though not just Troy, the whole plot has a very "touch it and it may shatter" feel to it, mostly due to the deep, even sophisticated prose. The genre itself, however, is very obscure. Subplots encompass many genres without focusing on one in particular: Thriller, romance, paranormal, mystery. I felt disoriented by this, not being sure where the story was going to go next. I feel like the book had a lot more potential- if it was simply more focused. In the end, however, I can say that I truly did enjoy the book overall. I love mysteries, and this one was a fun, deep and disturbing story. I wish things ended more resolved, but all in all I was satisfied with it.
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| 3 Hot Espressos |
This review was part of the Fracture blog tour
