Reflections

Until she falls off the back of a pickup truck in book one of this series, leaking some kind of machine fluid instead of bleeding, Mila has no idea that the gaps in her memory and the overprotective tendencies of her mother are clues to her real nature. Which is android--and when she finds out she is just as horrified as she thinks everyone else will be. As this second book opens Mila has escaped from the military facility that wants to use her as a weapon, the place where she was tortured and forced to fight her evil look-a-like twin android sister, but the woman she knows as her mother is now dead and Mila is left with only cryptic clues about her past, the obviously false childhood memories that keep surfacing, and who she should go to for help.

So Mila calls on Hunter, the guy she liked before she discovered she isn’t an average teenage girl and the guy she still gets heart palpitations around even though she knows she’s a machine, doesn’t have an actual heart, and what’s she doing with emotions anyway. Without updating Hunter about what she now knows about herself and her situation, Mila makes up a story that convinces him to road-trip with her so she stay one step ahead of the people trying to recapture her while trying to make contact with someone who can explain things. The fast action excitement of the plot and the exciting discoveries Mila keeps making about her useful android abilities get a little bogged down by Mila’s predictable and somewhat excessive internal agonizing about keeping her secret from Hunter, though generally I’m greatly enjoying the friction created between Mila’s human and machine sides.

Author Debra Driza smoothly worked review information into the first chapters of Renegade, a big help for readers like me who have had a time gap since reading Mila 2.0. Along with Mila we learn more about who/what she is in this second book, and we meet some of the key people from her past--though it’s not always clear who can be trusted.  There is still a lot of story left to tell, and I look forward to reading the next book.