Review: MILA 2.0

Title: MILA 2.0
Author: Debra Driza
Genre: YA, science fiction

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

I was so excited for this - a girl android who thinks she's human? Think of all the possibilities! - but I didn't like it very much.

My main complaint is that the story seems very disjointed. The first bit is Mila being a normal human teenage girl going through high school drama. There's the super annoying "best friend" who has a crush on the same guy as Mila, and the guy just happens to be the super cute yet sensitive new kid at the school (I was trying very hard to restrain eyerolls. Very hard.). There's also the usual rumor mill going on about Mila and her family because her dad recently passed away in a fire. The next bit is where Mila discovers she is an android and freaks out as mysterious things keep happening to her. Much of this stage of the book involves Mila being in denial of the fact that she isn't human and being disgusted with her android capabilities. The next stage involves a series of tests and a sinister blackmailing man. This, I felt, was the most interesting part of the story. And finally, because we must go full circle, the super cute yet sensitive guy reappears at the end of the story after spending over 100 pages AWOL. Oh, and there's mother-daughter bonding thrown in there too.

Ok, that made the book sound a lot worse than it actually is, but it was very choppy and segmented. I felt like Mila took way too long to accept who she was; I understand that it can be disorienting and earth-shattering to find out that your memories are actually just random bits of code programmed into you and that your mom isn't actually your mom, but Mila's degree of disgust and the length of time she spent in self-loathing seemed too much.

I did like how a large part of the novel was about the relationship between Mila and her "mom." Her mom has a lot of secrets, but she always had Mila's best interest in mind. The way they grow closer after quite a bit of distrust and a bunch of hurdles was really nice.
I wasn't too upset when the mother died, but I thought it was sadly fitting that she sacrifice her life for her life's work. She truly believed Mila was more than her programming and gave all that she had to make Mila herself and the rest of the world see the same thing.

I also liked the comparison between Mila 2.0, the android with emotions, to the other characters.
Mila 3.0 was possibly my favorite character. She was pretty freaky, what with her lack of conscience or emotion. I thought she made a nice foil for Mila 2.0; without her, I don't think I would have considered Mila 2.0 to be as "human" as I did.

I don't think this is a particularly bad book, per say, but I can't say I enjoyed it. It brings up some interesting ideas, but I feel like there are other books out there that could make a much more interesting and compelling story out of similar ideas.

Comments

  1. Totally agree with your review. One note - I couldn't see your spoilers. When I click on the link, the screen just flashes for a second and then goes back to the non-spoiler review. Thanks for stopping by my blog!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for letting me know about the spoiler tags! I found a new html code that works much better.

      Delete

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