My Mechanical Romance, by Alexene Farol Folmuth, follows two characters drawn together by their school robotics team. Bel has just transferred schools at the start of her senior year due to her parents’ divorce, and finds herself thrust into AP Physics and onto the robotics team after accidentally revealing a hidden talent for engineering through a thrown-together-at-the-last-minute physics project. Teo Luna, on the other hand, had been single-mindedly pursuing robotics for the entirety of high school, determined to excel in everything and help everybody. As the two clash over robotics decisions, they eventually find themselves becoming unlikely friends, and soon even more.

I really liked Bel. She’s funny and relatable and always true to herself. She’s quirky, but not in a not-like-the-other-girls way, which I appreciated. I really enjoyed her struggles with her parents expectations of her, how to feel about their divorce, and what she wants for herself. She has two older brothers, though only one of them (Luke) plays any sort of real part in the book. They’re very different; one goes to Dartmouth and is doing pre-med and computer science, while Luke dropped out of college and also seems to be trying to figure out what he wants to do. Between those two opposites, Bel’s still trying to figure out who she is, and what future she wants to pursue.

Teo, meanwhile, is bearable, I guess. He’s at his best halfway through the book when he’s interacting more with Bel; I just couldn’t get interested in him as an individual character. He;s under a lot of stress from his father, who’s a celebrity app developer of some sort, and doesn’t see either of his parents much. He’s very driven, very much a know-it-all, and has apparently never been challenged on anything until Bel comes along. I did like him well enough by the end of the book, but he was definitely a bit insufferable at the beginning. I do think the book would have been stronger if he’d not been a narrator, and Bel was the sole protagonist, but I did warm up to him.

I did really like the romance of the book, though I wish it had been explored more. There were a lot of time jumps and such, and I wish we’d gotten to see more of the gradual development of feelings between the two. What elements of the romance were there were adorable and I shipped it so hard; I just wish there was more of it.

The thing I liked most about the book was its discussion of the way that women are generally treated and looked at in STEM. Bel’s realization of this, and her conversations with Neelam, one of the only other girls on the robotics team, on the topic are some of the strongest elements of the book, and are another factor that I wish was covered more. I’ve been on high school robotics teams, and there are elements of sexism discussed in the book that are definitely at play there, if in more subtle ways than depicted here.

One big pet peeve for me was the unrealistic qualities of the college process as depicted here, primarily just the notion that a character who only applies to one school, that school being MIT, would have any reason to expect to get in there. You need to apply to more than one school in this day and age, particularly if that school is MIT.

Overall, I did enjoy My Mechanical Romance, and I’m giving it four stars. It’s a really cute YA contemporary book, and if you love that genre then you’ll love this. I really liked the STEM aspects of it, since we don’t see that a lot in these types of books. Although Teo annoyed me, the romance was still cute, and I think most other aspects of the book were done really well. I’m giving this book 4 stars; if you’re a fan of When Dimple Met Rishi or other enemies-to-forced-colleagues-to-friends-lovers books, then definitely give this a go.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.