Author: Debra Driza

Rating: 4/5

Synopsis

Mila was never meant to learn the truth about her identity. She was a girl living with her mother in a small Minnesota town. She was supposed to forget her past —that she was built in a secret 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. However, what Mila’s becoming is beyond anyone’s imagination, including her own, and it just might save her life.

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. IN THE IMMORTAL WORDS OF RIVER SONG, “SPOILERS!”

Here we begin with Mila Daily, just a normal quiet girl crushing on the new hot boy in school while dealing with the overwhelming pain from her father’s death just a month before.

Until an accident occurs and she find’s out her entire life is a lie, and she’s not human at all. Mila, or Mobile Intel Lifelike Android, is a military experiment created in a lab. Now they’re on the run, and Mila has to come to terms with this reality while trying to cope with being mechanical.

I was thrilled at the possibility of this book. The prose reminded me of a decade old show, Dark Angel, where embryos were whipped up in a lab and placed into surrogates, genetically created to be the perfect soldier.

And Mila, while completely wires and metal  beneath her skin, has evolved, into something more than the defense system she was created as. She has humanity.

While the idea of this sounded so amazing, the first half of the book was executed poorly. I didn’t really care for the side characters at all. Kaylee, Mila’s FRIEND, was a backstabbing biaaatch of the ninth degree. Seriously, Mila should’ve cut off Kaylee’s leg or something as horrible as she was.

I liked the second, more action-packed half of the book. That was swell, except the boring parts where Mila thinks constantly of Hunter, who she’s only hung out with a couple of times. Eyeroll. The romance would’ve been better if it had been more subtle. I get that holding on to the thought of Hunter was what she rationalized as keeping her humanity, trying to have a semblance of normalcy, but she could’ve focused that fixation on anyone, with as much as she didn’t know Hunter that well.

All in all, it was alright. I’d read the sequel, but I wouldn’t gush about it.