Author: Debra Driza
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780007507283
Rating: A
No one suspects what she's made of...After the sudden death of her father, Mila's at a new school, trying to fit in and falling for mysterious sexy Hunter. But her world slams upside down in a heartbeat when a car accident reveals a secret she never knew; a secret about herself. Mila is devastated to learn that her memories are just chimeras, her dreams untrue. She can't even rely on her emotions to tell her who she is. So how can she grieve for her father or feel the way she does about Hunter? And why is her mom running scared? Worse still, who are the creepy stalkers so desperate to get their hands on her...?
Well what can I say? This is Divergent Meets The Host, both of which were books that I loved and adored so there was no choice but for me to fall in love with Mila 2.0.
Lets start with Mila 2.0 Origins, the Fire. This is the short free prequel to Mila 2.0 that you can pick up from the Amazon Kindle store, so before I read Mila 2.0 I decided to give The Fire a go. It blew me away. It jumps right in with a punchy action filled scene that instantly leaves you breathless and wanting more. You instantly feel a connection to character and the use of sympathy make you want to read on. The Fire is just essentially a taster sample to get you to buy Mila 2.0, but you should buy Mila 2.0 anyway. It's a killer novel.
Mila 2.0 is a sci fi/Ya book which is really nice because there's a fine line between Dystopian and Sci-fi and most YA book around this genre seem to fall into the Dystopia genre. So the fact this was Sci-fi was really nice and different! I mean I'm not usually keen on Sci-Fi but Mila 2.0 seemed interesting enough and I am so glad I read this book. It will definitely stand out for a while.
The Book follows, Mila, a girl android, as she discovers who she is and why she is on the run. It then follows her as she falls in love and gets captured. I know what you're thinking? Helpless girl android gets saved by brooding boy? Wrong! Surprisingly enough the boy doesn't actually play much of a part in this which was really different yet so nice. The blurb led me to believe that the boy would play a main part in the story, as most boys do in YA fiction, but this was a breath of fresh air it was solely based on the story of Mila being an Android rather than the whole difficult love situation with the girl trying to explain what she is etc.
The story is really action packed and I loved it. It is a tad slow starting and as I progressed I wondered if a couple of the early scenes were necessary but putting that aside there wasn't a fault. A flawless novel. This book utterly thrilled me. The story was extremely well crafted and simple to understand. Thats one thing you have to be really careful of when writing Sci-Fi; how easy your concept is to understand and explain but Driza made this so easy to understand the science and technology. Also the story flowed really nicely too. It was smooth and kink free and the events all fitted together nicely.
The writing was a joy. I think the POV of writing from a machine is really unique, however human they may be, and the fact that Driza explained technological functions in first person was a really interesting way to write. The writing itself was gorgeous. Just the right amount of dialogue balanced with the perfect amount of description. And the action scenes were masterfully crafted too. The pace wasn't too quick on them and they were described in detail, so vividly they played out in your mind like a TV.
The characters. The nice thing I liked about this is that it wasn't confusing. Driza kept the characters to a minimum with about 5 main ones and it worked perfectly. They were built in your mind so well and because there was so much time to spend on each one they became your friends. (apart from the evil ones.) You felt like you knew them and they really evoked emotion in all the right places.
Overall I think this a Masterfully Crafted Novel. It will enthral anyone for hours and thrill you until your heart cant pump any faster and most definitely, will leave you wanting more.
