I am in FRACTUREs

Fracture
By: Megan Miranda
Reported by: Julianna Helms
**This book is part of the 2012 DAC challenge**

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?

For fans of best-sellers like Before I Fall and If I Stay, this is a fascinating and heart-rending story about love and friendship and the fine line between life and death. 

-Summary from Goodreads  
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As I read this book, there was a particular stanza in Taylor Swift's If This Was A Movie that came to my mind...

Come back, come back, come back to me like 
you would, before you said it's not that easy. 
Before the fight, before I left you out.

This was the most personal book I have ever read. It was irrevocably broken. Tragically beautiful. Unexpectedly fascinating. Pleadingly hopeful. Heartbreakingly desperate.


I am shattered into fractures as I attempt to think about this book and write an extremely difficult review. It is nearly impossible to encapsulate my feelings. So perhaps I should start this out with a question.


If you had one day left to live, what would you do?


I know what I would do. I would go to Alaska, go on a cruise ship, and sail straight into the wind of the unknown. I would stand out on the deck, hands gripping the rails, watching the plethora of wildlife, of uninterrupted nature erupt with beauty in front of my eyes. I would stand there and feel myself soak in the life of everything. To feel.


But if I had to equate that journey, that aching experience into one concrete thing, I would call it Fracture.


Delaney is a miracle. A fluke, a mistake, a lie. She constantly shifts back and forth between doing what she needs to do and what she wants to do.  She is this unstable bomb that shoved her way straight into my heart. She was broken, she was gone, she was still there, she was this massive question of the unknown and hopeful and terrifying. She was how I felt, but her situation was worse, and it was, then, from the first page that I met her and discovered her dilemma that I knew I would love this book, and I did. Oh, I did so much.


Originally, I did not want to read this book. I saw a myriad of similar premises during the time I discovered this, so I wasn't particularly that interested. But when I read Slide by Jill Hathaway, and Jill recommended this book... I just had to read it. And I am so, so incredibly glad, so incredibly thankful I did.


After reading this book, I wanted to scream. To shout. To laugh until I doubled over and started crying. To throw myself and drown in a lake of Megan Miranda's words. I was in love. This book was everything I needed right then, right now. I needed love. Hope. Strength. Resilience. The heroine who comes out scarred, but still alive, still standing, still strong. I needed that, and that was exactly what I got.


This review is getting long, and I'm sorry. Applause if you're still reading. But this book deserves so much, and yet so little in my own, vain, thoughts. Because I want to share it with everyone, but I also don't, because I want to keep it to myself and keep it as my own, just look at it and associate it with me and everything else would just fall away into oblivion.


One thing that impressed me tremendously was Megan's shockingly phenomenal ability to walk the tightrope between the supernatural and the scientific. She gives you a realistic explanation, but also hints at something more omnipotent. She talks of purposes and trades and lies and death and empty voids in truthful, bold ways that twisted my heart. I cried during this book, because I was so struck by the relativity of Delaney and me. It was like someone took a knife of my own making and stabbed me with it again and again and again until I was just this mess of bleeding emotion. 


This book was, in one such inadequate word, amazing. I urge you to read it. I urge you to experience what I felt. I urge you to join me, for our hearts may be made of fractures pieced together, some of our decisions may be the absence of thought, but this book, it is empty in the void of imperfection. 


Have you ever seen red, orange leaves spiral and collapse in the fall? See them land to their death in a graceful and resilient way?


Because beauty is not always looks, and beauty is not always brains. Beauty is the recognition in the difference of both, and the unique distinction of that such an inadequate concept does not truly exist in objectivity. 

And this book is it. Beauty.

If you had one day left  to live, what would you do?


Do it.