A review by roshanreads
My Mechanical Romance by Alexene Farol Follmuth

emotional funny inspiring lighthearted medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Thank you to NetGalley and Holiday House Books for the eARC!

If there’s one book you should read this year, this is it. I love this book. It’s definitely one of my favourites this year, possibly ever. My Mechanical Romance has everything I possibly could have wanted in a book; dual POV, girls in STEM, a diverse cast, and characters that fail sometimes, and quite badly. Once I picked this book up, I could barely put it down. Obviously, it was a five-star read without hesitation, and that’s a rating I don’t usually give to romance novels.

My Mechanical Romance is the story of Bel Maier as her talents for robotics and doing her homework the day it's due lands her in an advanced physics class and gets her a place on the school robotics team. She’s not particularly happy with either of those events, which is understandable considering the less than warm reception from some of the other robotics team members. However, over the course of the book, she finds her place and her natural talents begin to shine as the team prepares for the biggest robotics competition of the year. 

I have so many good things to say about this book that I almost don’t know where to start, but that doesn’t help convince people that they should read the book (you really should, by the way). I loved this book so much I basically forgot to make notes because I was so focused on finding out what was on the next page and what was going to happen.

Bel and Teo are so cute. I love how they worked together as rivals and when they didn’t see eye to eye, and then still competed with each other after they were together. They talked to each other about the problems they were having, and they worked so well as a team! Also, how could I not ship them after reading the line ‘Because wherever I am, I want her close by’? It would be literally impossible. Spoiler time, even when they broke up, they still cared about each other and believed in each other.

Now, time for even more spoilers because I want to talk about everything that happened in this book to whoever will listen. 

The problems the characters face in this book seem so real. Neelam talking about how women in STEM aren’t taken seriously and have to work so much harder to prove themselves made me tear up a little bit more than I want to admit, and Neelam and Bel crushing Richardson and his bot after the comments he made was phenomenal. I’m so glad Neelam and Bel became friends towards the end of the book after their rocky beginning.

Even the breakup felt realistic. The pressure on Bel to get into MIT was building, from Teo telling his father about Bel getting in, to Neelam telling her that she shouldn’t expect to get in just because she can build a good robot. There was even a conversation about how incredibly hard it is to get into a super prestigious college if you don’t have the right start in life, and how unfair it is to expect people to compete with someone with all the benefits in the world.

I love how Bel goes from having, like, zero goals beyond high school and avoids doing homework and assignments until the last possible minute, only to win a robotics competition and have a college seek her out specifically because she’s so good at what she does. I love that Bel didn’t get into MIT when she applied with Teo, and I love that her plans didn’t work out exactly as she wanted them to. Despite the fact that I was devastated for Bel, it was a nice reminder that happy endings don’t need to be exactly as you envision them. </spoiler?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, read this book. You won’t regret it at all. This book alone makes me want to auto-buy anything and everything Alexene Farol Follmuth writes. I gave it a five-star rating, and it’s the reason I made a 2022 Favourite Books list. Read My Mechanical Romance. 

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