Mila 2.0 – Debra Driza (2014)
So… Mila 2.0 was billed as a “Bourne Identity–style trilogy about a girl who discovers she is actually an android” which is almost infinitely more interesting than the truth.
We start off with musings like these:
… saving his mouth from perfection in an intriguing way.
Wait. What?
He shrugged, a loose-limbed eloquent gesture that almost made words unnecessary.
Really. What?!
The first third of this book is like some bizarro combination of Mean Girls and Clueless with a VERY over protective mother a la Marlin from Finding Nemo, with Robocop for added flavour.
Boy-obsessed girls who get catty enough with each other have caused serious injury or death.
Girls who are mean enough to get pissy with a girl who lost her father in a horrific house-fire three months earlier.
Really, they are very nice girls from Minnesota.
Mila our ultra introspective heroine who starts to wonder what’s wrong with her when she grabs a friend a little too forcefully. Personally, if a parent of mine had died three months prior and my new best-friend was being an uber-C I might feel guilty, but I don’t think I’d actually wonder what was wrong with me, I’m pretty sure I’d just assume my friend was being an uber-C and I needed to up my mood regulators and get a grip.
Once Mila is outed the whole tone of the book shifts, and admittedly it gets much better.
FINALLY! A mother-daughter adventure, well, at least for awhile.
The adventure picks up, the dumb girl thing takes a bit of a hiatus, and we start to get some actual adventure going.
Mila is the first in a series (of course) but I think I’ll give the rest a miss. There just isn’t enough to make me want to invest in three (possibly plus) more books.
I think it’s because I just can’t handle more girly-girl boy obsession.
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Rapunzel Untangled – Cindy C. Bennett
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs
The 5th Wave – Rick Yancey
Katherine Tegen Books, April 2014 496 pages ISBN: 9780062090379 Suggested Reading Level: Grade +7
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