Jacky has a stutter. She got the nick name Ha-Ha because she struggled to say her last name. She decided to adopt that and become a class clown. She ended up with many days of detention due to a joke cna bad. The drama teacher halpe bail her out with the option to be in the play instead. Meanwhile, her mother has been deployed to the Middle East and her lifeguard dad seems to be staying out late with a beautiful woman. This leaves the kids to take care of themselves at home. And if that is not enough, Jacky will be entering a speech contest, and Grandma is getting sick. There are plenty of minor adventures before her grandma dies, her mom comes home, and she wins the speech contest. She also discovers that the woman her dad was seeing was he mom's friend who was helping him prep for police academy exam. It all ends happily ever after - and we learn that this was just a backstory for somebody that is now a famous Saturday Night Live comedian. It has just the right level of "bizarre normality" where it could be a real memoir.
In the final Mila 2.0 book, Debra Driza seems to have reached her word count mid-story and abruptly ended the book. I felt I must have been missing something when the tides rapidly turned and the book came to a conclusion. Through most of the book, Mila is becoming more and more human. However, she returns back to her android self to "save" herself. You just want to inject some sense in her. She gets stuck in some bizarre love triangle. She still has attachment to her old boyfriend (who totally freaked when she fessed to be being android and killing a relative.) The boy who is helping her obviously has affection, but she tries to deny it. She gradually gets back more memories from her "human" self. The evil military man is just too evil. He is "bad guy" cast from central casting. He is trying to sell mind-controlled teenage warriors to foreign governments. Somehow people continue to follow him through the most harebrained of ideas. Even an elite private school manages to be an inadvertent participant in his scheme. Mila seems to get lucky break after lucky break. Things get just bad enough to keep the action going. The book has some things going for it, yet the flaws are difficult to overcome.
At the end of the first Mila book, she escaped from the government compound with her "mother", only to have "mom" get killed. (With the way the government goons were portrayed you ahve to wonder why they would be creating a an android girl.) In this book, she is on the run. She calls her friend Hunter. He is crazy enough to drive from Minnesota to Virginia Beach to see her. (You have to wonder what is up with that?) She doesn't tell him the truth, and suspects that something may be up with him. Perhaps he is a spy? You feel that she is overreacting just a little too much. You just wish she would be a little more truthful. IT feels that he is innocent. Her "mom" seems to have led her on a random "quest" to find more information about herself by following a random adventure. In the quest she learns that there is a part of a real human in her. She also discovers that the bad guys might actually be good guys, or perhaps they are really bad guys. People she trusts are pawns in the actions of others. She doesn't trust the right people enough, but trusts the wrong people too much. How do you know who best to trust? Being a teenager is tough. It is even tougher when you are an android.
A girl moves to a small town in Minnesota. She has vague memories living in Philadelphia with her father. However, he died in a fire and she moved out to rural Minnesota with her mother. She had been trying to slowly adapt to small town life when she meets a boy from San Diego. Her friend is hot for the boy and gets upset with her. Eventually, she sends her to the bed of a pickup while she "drag races" with the boy. She is flown from the car and is barely injured, other than a severed arm that reveals machinery. She then discovers that she was actually an android (Mila 2.0) created by the military and her mother was one of the scientists that helped create her.