Book Impressions: Mila 2.0 by Debra Driza

When I first heard about Mila 2.0, I was really excited - the blurb made it sound like a book with a lot of potential.

The blurb did not lie. Mila 2.0 did indeed have a lot of potential. Unfortunately the book did not quite deliver, not the way I'd hoped, and most of that potential was left unfulfilled. This doesn't mean it was a bad book - I think many of the target group will find it great, adrenaline-filled fun! - but it could have been so much better.

Mila 2.0

 

Debra Driza

 

***

 

 

Mila was living with her mother in a small Minnesota town when she discovered she was also living a lie.

She was never meant to learn the truth about her identity. She was never supposed to remember the past—that she was built in a computer science lab and programmed to do things real people would never do.

Now she has no choice but to run—from the dangerous operatives who want her terminated because she knows too much, and from a mysterious group that wants to capture her alive and unlock her advanced technology.

Evading her enemies won't help Mila escape the cruel reality of what she is and cope with everything she has had to leave behind. However, what she's becoming is beyond anyone's imagination, including her own, and that just might save her life.

A compulsively readable sci-fi thriller, Mila 2.0 is Debra Driza's bold debut and the first book in an action-filled, Bourne Identity–style trilogy.

I have to admit I really struggled with the first part. Mila, our protagonist, was not by any means a particularly dreadful "typical" teenage girl, but she was... well, a teenage girl, and the first part of the novel was very much focused on teenage girl daily life - school troubles, brand name dropping (oh dear, the brand name dropping and the descriptions of clothes), crushing on a cute boy pretty much at first sight...

And this brings me to one of the things I really disliked - both about this book and a trend in girl-protagonist YA fiction these days in general: there are very rarely any other girls, apart from the protagonist, who are in any way allowed to be cool, decent human beings. Nope - we have our awesome protagonist, and then we have the mean, bitchy girls who only care about parties and clothes and boys and can't wait to stab other girls in the back. (Oh, and if there are any other girls in addition, they're the mousy, pointless, useless wallpaper, just barely existing.) Unfortunately this was one of the many, many tropes and clichés in this book.

Things did get more interesting once the actual plot turned up in part two, and while I found the plot itself really rather ridiculous, there was a lot of fast-paced action and some occasionally nice introspection from Mila to make for some reasonably exciting reading.

On the other hand, I was somewhat irritated by the inclusion of yet another trope - the dreaded love triangle. Well... I suppose it didn't quite materialise, but considering the numerous times we got to read about Lucas's gold-tipped eyelashes (while Mila appeared to have almost forgotten about her high school insta-crush Hunter), it was clearly meant to be there to make the reader wonder. The only saving grace for both the insta-crush and the budding love triangle was that both Hunter and Lucas were, if not particularly fascinating characters, then at least not unappealing.

All in all, I think this is a book that may appeal to the actual target group, i.e. teen girls who also want some action and adrenaline in their reading, but I'm not at all sure of its crossover potential to adult readers.

* ARC of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley. Thanks!