“MILA 2.0” by Debra Driza

If I were the type of person to stop reading a book I didn’t like, this would have been it.  I wish I were that kind of person, as I slogged through this whole thing more and more regretful with every page that I just couldn’t walk away.  It started out “okay” and quickly became lame, followed by ridiculous.  ***SPOILER ALERT***  The premise isn’t that bad.  Teenage girl discovers she isn’t really a teenage girl, but an android, created by the military and then “taken” by a researcher who wants her to have a chance at a real life.  There are echoes of “Cinder” here  (Marissa Meyer has a comment on the back) with the whole human/not human thing and a drop-off ending whose only purpose is to set up the sequel, but the difference is stark … “Cinder” has real literary quality.  This book does not.  “MILA 2.0” falls into every YA book trap I hate.  1)  It’s poorly written.  Sentence structure is weak and repetitive, with the kind of prose I see from students who are just starting out in their high-school level writing.  2)  It’s very poorly edited.  Typos and grammar issues abound throughout.  Incorrect words are sometimes in place, there are sentences which aren’t sentences and at one point, a character’s name is simply truncated, with the end left off.  Did no one notice?  3)  The cover art, as usual, does not match the character.  Described as a “stocky” 16 year-old girl with brown hair and eyes (“like her father”) on page 10, she suddenly has green eyes by page 95.  Then, she dyes her hair black and cuts it short and “spiky” later in the tale … but never, in my imagination, looks similar to the ballerina-like portrait of a young woman with porcelain skin on the cover.  4)  The structure is poor.  Chapter breaks seem to be dictated by length rather than need and the four section breaks don’t seem to have any reason at all.  Each new section picks up seconds after the old one with no significant change or break in the narrative.  The story is a paradox … it is simultaneously all over the place and goes nowhere.  Mila falls for every young man she meets (two of them) within five minutes, but the romance aspect just seems stuffed into the story to make the tale appeal to teens.  Mila’s “big dilemma” in the novel is to reconcile who she is with, well, who she is.  But it takes 470 pages.  And near the end, she is still as whiney and un-accepting of her “new reality” as she was on page 50.  Ms. Driza also gets caught up in her own compulsion for details.  She describes two bullets entering (someone’s) body.  “Both bullets entered the left side” but inexplicably, one hits the liver … which is on the right side.  As a casual viewer of TV medical shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” even I know that.  When describing a car chase around DC, the description of roads used was so ridiculous that I started laughing out loud (not the heart-pounding exhilaration I was supposed to be feeling, methinks?)  As a resident of this area, I’m used to media getting it wrong, but in books, I expect better research.  There obviously was some … Driza mentions the “Kutz” bridge, which she pretty much would have had to look up – but describes it as “looming over the Potomac” when it is, in fact, a small causeway that lives a scant three feet above the Tidal Basin.  Most people who drive on it would not even consider it a “bridge.”  It was this kind of consistent sloppiness that made the book distracting and silly.  Obviously, not a fan and not waiting for the “next” book in the series.  Sorry.