A review by cavalary
MILA 2.0 by Debra Driza

2.0

Read this in Romanian, picked up from the Library after somewhat accidentally ending up with the sequel at the end of a World Book Day event. However, being included in the otherwise pointless free prequel, I read the first seven chapters in English as well, so I can say that I guess the writing style isn't bad in itself... But the translation is quite poor, with some obvious mistakes I could spot and who knows how many others, after those first chapters, which I had no way to notice, plus a confusing way to print thoughts up to a point. There are things that can be fixed mentally if you pay attention, but others just confuse and at least a few may well lead to understanding something that's the opposite of the original meaning. Plus, metric units are used in some places, but not in most others, so I'm assuming the translator didn't bother to convert and that's how it was in the original as well, but I can't be sure. It's odd either way.
About the book itself, while there are some interesting scenes, I tend to be pretty surprised that plenty of people like this sort of thing. The fact that the main character is annoyingly emotional and that leads to bad decisions and difficulty in making any somewhat reasonable ones may be explained by her programming, so she and the author may be judged less harshly for it than if she'd have actually been human, but fewer excuses can be found for the success rate of, and I'd even say praise for, irrational decisions after a point. More importantly, just about any other character is one-dimensional, the first six and a half chapters consist almost entirely of particularly silly teen drama and the few scattered hints of something more interesting are pointless anyway when the reader already knows what the main character is, there's instant romance and a sudden return to it later, and the entire book seems like the novelization of the tutorial of an action game that doesn't properly start before the end.