Publication: 27th January 2012
Publisher: Bloomsbury Australia
Pages: 261
Genre: Paranormal
Age Appropriate: Young Adult
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.
My Thoughts.
What I loved so much about this book was the originality of a subject we don't read a lot about.
Delaney is out with her friend Decker going to meet a bunch of their other friends when while walking across an ice covered lake she falls and cracks the ice and before she knows it she falls in and is trapped under the ice.
We then flash forward to 6 days later and Delaney miraculously awakens from her coma, everybody including her doctor expected her to stay in a vegetative state and never wake up, it's then she's told she was dead for 11 minutes, pulled out of the lake and given cpr by Decker.
It's while she's in hospital that she feels her first pull towards the dying but at the time she doesn;t realise what it is but because of her brain damge she knows when someone is going to die the stronger the pull the closer they are to death.
After getting out of hospital she feels different and herv parents her Mum in particular treat her like she can't be trusted with anything not even to touch the oven and it's while out studying at the library one day with a friend that she meets Troy a boy she finds out who was also in a coma and has the same ability that she now does, the only difference being he speeds up their deaths belieiving it's better to put them out of their misery.
Also through all this Delaney realises that she has feelings for Decker and it's her jealousy of his relationship with Tara a semi friend of their's that drives a wedge between them, Delaney feels she's losing everyone around her, her Mum turns into a shallow shell not eating, compulsively cleaning and being extremely overprotective, her and Decker aren't talking and through time she comes to fear Troy, while also trying to prolong the lives of the people she knows are going to die.
Even though everyone was so happy she survived Delaney feels alienated from everyone and wonders whether it would have been better for everyone if she never woke up.
I loved this story,it flowed really well and I just wanted to keep reading to know what was going to happen next.
I give this 4/5.
A big thanks to Sonia @ Bloomsbury Australia.
