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Title: My Mechanical Romance Author: Alexene Farol Follmuth Date Finished: June 4, 2022 Goodreads Links: [Book] [Review]

Star Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

[Thank you NetGalley and Holiday House for providing this ARC to me in exchange for an honest review.]

Review:

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Bel is a new transfer student whose coming off a bad year, and is kind of looking for a place to belong. While all her classmates at this new school have high plans for college and their life, Bel finds herself blank when she thinks about her future — especially when she's asked directly about it.

Teo Luna was raised with very specific expectations as the son of a tech whiz, and those expectations as his father's son seem to have followed him into high school as well, where they're all waiting for Teo to be that stand-up guy, available for everything, a master of all trades, involved in every extracurricular under the sun.

Bel and Teo are thrown together when a teacher spots Bel's innate talent for design, and leads her straight to the robotics team that Teo captains. Bel doesn't have a lick of expectation of being accepted onto the team, but Teo spots her sketching out a better, near-flawless design for the audition problem, and he's sold.

They get off to a rough start, obviously.

To Bel, Teo is nothing but a rich, stuck-up boy who doesn't know how to take criticism and feedback, and just wants everyone to agree to everything he says. To Teo, Bel is infuriating because she's standoffish, and doesn't play as a team — and she's a threat to his life plan because he'd never counted on someone like her in his life.

They're both right and wrong, obviously.

The best part of this book was undoubtedly that these kids were allowed to be kids, and make stupid decisions, and get in trouble with their parents. Bel and Teo come from very different backgrounds but a lot of the flaws they have are similar, and they manage to strike a balance between themselves.

Bel's relationship with her family was a cornerstone of this, and while I do wish there had been a little bit more resolution on that front, it wasn't necessary for the purpose of the story so I don't think the book was lacking anything. Teo came off as someone who comes from privilege, and a lot of his flaws came from the fact that his privilege is rooted with his dad's expectations of him. I like that the author didn't shy away from those two co-existing statements.

I loved watching Bel and Teo's relationship develop through the book, through their common ground, and while I don't understand a lick of whatever was explained here besides the basic physics, I love that both of them got a change to feed off and balance each other's goals and help support each other — even if they hit a few major roadblocks along the way!

I also think that because these are high schoolers, some of the plot choices make sense. They are inevitably going to mess up in ways that are embarrassing because at that age, you don't know what you're doing, so you do stupid things, learn a lesson and then hopefully not do it again.

It wouldn't be a true review of this book if I didn't talk about the very real element of women in STEM that the author put in there. We have side characters who, in my opinion, are representative of the two extremes of approaching the misogyny — Neelam, who will push harder to try to get a spot to the point of bitterness, and Lora, who might just defer to the norm in a bid for honey instead of vinegar.

As a STEM major myself (particularly a woman of color!), I've been through the exact dilemma that Bel and the other girls were going through. Never being seen, always watching it be "a boy's world," watching teachers shower praise and accolades on the male students and never anyone else, etc etc. These are things that were familiar to me in high school and college, and are still familiar now, and I loved that we could get the representation for that. Because when I was in school, no one ever talked about it. You were expected to keep your head down, because if praise didn't turn your way, wrath and blame certainly did.

This book isn't as serious as that, but it's just as serious as you'd expect a book about 17 and 18 year old high schoolers to be. They're learning lessons as the book goes on, while falling in love with each other, and I think that was done fantastically.

Honestly, I just love the way the characters were crafted. I swung back and forth on a lot of them before realizing that was the point! They're finding things out about themselves, and somewhere, it dragged up all my stuff from high school, too, about being the overachieving student trying to score a spot to go to medical school.

(Also let's be real, I love seeing nerds being celebrated because I, too, am a nerd.)