My Mechanical Romance is a dual point of view young adult romance novel featuring the two main characters, Bel and Mateo. When Bel is aceing her on-level physics class, she gets moved up to advanced physics, where she begins to butt heads with Teo, who's the president of the robotics team and is somewhat of an extreme control freak. When Bel joins the team, their rivalry only gets worse until Mateo finally realizes that Bel is by far the smartest person on the robotics team.

This book was one of my favorite reads of 2022! Bel and Teo are so cute and the fact that the third act breakup wasn't rooted in some sort of misogyny made the book even better - especially when highlighting women in stem without shoving it in your face (as a fellow women in engineering - thank you).

Enjoyed this but didn’t love it. Sometimes these cartoon covers are hit or miss for me. Overall okay

I adored this cute romance that indeed has bots!
Love how the author dives into woman in STEM along with the challenges, especially since Bel is a person of color. The whole female mindset and kicking dudes butts along with girls can do anything that boys can do was just adorbs in this YA romcom book, definitely recommend to all!

I didn’t give it five stars just because some of the chapters felt too short or just passed way too much which could’ve gone into more details I feel like.
I feel like too I would’ve love to see more Teo with his problems with his own family than just Bel?? It could just be me but overall I enjoyed this a lot!

4.5 rounded down to 4.

I loved this book so much! This is truly a book that I wish I had when I was younger. I was on an all girls robotics team in middle school and I honestly forgot about it until I read this book.

I also loved the dialogue around Teo feeling like everyone always relied on him. While I didn't have that exact experience, I did have a huge amount of stress on me (mostly from myself) when I was applying to colleges and it was very hard for me to process.

This is GREAT YA for women in STEM!!

This book was so sweet! I wish when I was a teenager that I could have read something like this. The main characters are so lovable and you find yourself rooting for them the whole time. I recommended this to some of my high school teacher friends, but also to anyone that loves a good roman as well as story about women in science. Thank you #netgalley for the gifted copy!

First, thankyou NetGalley for this arc!

It was a cute enjoyable book, loved the STEM rep, but I got bored most of the time. I believe that some of y'all would really love this, but I expected more of the rivalry, a bit more tense I guess.
It is fast-paced and a good book for a non-English speaker.

This was such a good read and I highly recommend it to anyone loving fiction. I love the characters and the plot? It carries you through the whole story and makes you never want to put it down until the very end. Readers will love it from the very first page and all the way to the end?

I have read Alexene's other work under her pen name, Olivie Blake, and enjoyed it. While I mostly enjoyed this book it, unfortunately, fell a little flat for me. The characters were average and their story was average. One personal note is that this book is YA but there is an entire adult romance "STEMinst" series that I, respectfully, would recommend over this one. Thank you to Holiday House and NetGalley for providing me with a complimentary copy to review.

An interesting book which could benefit from some stronger characterisation/ pacing but still lots of fun!

Lovely romance. I liked it a lot. Left me for wanting to read more. I'm interested in reading more novels by this author.

Thanks Netgalley for allowing me to read this book! The title and this beautiful cover drew me in and i was excited to read this book! I will be recommending this book to others for readers advisory.

A sweet coming of age romance.

A slow burn, classmates to friends to lovers. Bel is fiery and you fall in love with her immediately. It was nice to see the nerdy jock Teo, not having to hide his nerdy side. I think the book being set at a school that focuses on academics really enhanced the story.

The side characters are interesting and I loved seeing Bel's friendships with them blossom from awkward new girl to best friends and the way she dealt with those changes. I found myself invested in their lives and their success in the robotics team. I touches on the massive inequality and covert and overt sexism in STEM and brought nuanced discussion to table .I loved that STEM was at the forefront of this book rather than a back ground plot point.

I loved the themes of family, friendship and first love that this book explored. I tackled difficult themes with tact and grace and never felt preach or made my eyes role.

Thank you @netgalley for my gifted copy in exchange for review.

I requested this book as I am such a huge fan of Olivie Blake’s other series The Atlas Six, and this solidified my love for the author. I don’t find my self picking up many YA books, however this was refreshing and I know I would have loved it even more in my teenage years.

This is such a cute story!
Pefect for when you have a reading slump.
I wouldn't say that this is an enemies to lovers story but more like secret admirer to lover kinda story. I freaking love it!

This book was delightful. I enjoyed the science elements in this. I’m so here for STEM romances.

The two main characters were so likeable and relatable, I enjoyed watching the romance develop between the two of them.

I think the ending was handled realistically with them ending up at two different schools but I do love that they stayed together. The two of them
as rivals even when they’re together makes me so happy

3/5
There were a lot of things I liked! And then there were some things I didn’t enjoy in this book.
The female rep in STEM is huge for me. Loved it. I want all of the females doing all the things we are told we aren’t “good at” because of our gender and the Patriarchy. POP OFF! The diversity also didn’t go unnoticed and was appreciated.

I did not enjoy all the portrayals of teen partying and sex. As a YA novel I felt like this was super distracting and didn’t really contribute to the story. It just kinda felt thrown in for the hell of it and to make it more edgy. So that took away from it for me.

Overall the enemies to romance aspect was decent. I just wanted more fleshed out characters and more depth in the teen aspect’s of the story.

We love to see a good romance that involves characters, especially women, involved in STEM. This story was so realistic, showing how lost you can truly be when you are in a transition period, especially the one that comes with the end of high school. This was such a fast read because you connect with the characters and want to know what is going to happen.

Very wholesome read with characters that are full of personality!
The characters have flaws and that's what makes it easier to relate to them. Fun read with some cute romance that shows that nerds are hot too!

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a digital copy of this book.

I of course liked the idea and potential behind this ,of women in STEM and robotics and trying to change perceptions. Unfortunately I couldn't get past how juvenile the dialogue was , it seemed like every second word was ' Um' or 'Like' . The characters were not particularly likeable, except maybe Neelam as she was the only slightly relatable one. This book didn't work for me but there are quite a few positive reviews so if you are looking for a quick YA story dealing with issues of young women of color in STEM fields, this might resonate.

When Bel forgets to do a physics project and invents something in the 15 minutes before class her physics teacher notices and recommends that she tries out for the Robotics club. Teo the unofficial leader of the robotics club invites her to join when he sees her application egg drop design. Teo excited to get Bel's eye on the Robotic design is annoyed when she points out all the flaws in the design. Annoyed Teo tasks bel with creating a new design and when she manually builds her idea to show the team, teo realises that she doesn't know how to use the robotics simulation system. Teo offers to teach Bel how to use the software and they start to fall for each other.

I love this book, it is such a short and sweet read. It can easily be read in one sitting and is very lighthearted. It gave me Ali Hazelwood vibes, but for teenagers. I love the romance and tension between teo and Bel and the angst was glorious! I loved that this was a women in STEM representation, but did find Neelam to be unnecessary Bitchy at times. I liked that Bel would often resort to being hands on with her designs and breaks the 'only men do engineering' mindset.

I disliked how the teacher Mac was very sexist. Like hello, he works for a private school full of highly educated men AND women unlikely that they would hire a teacher who ignores half of the schools population. That aside, it was a super cute romance read and would highly recommend.