Review: My Mechanical Romance

My Mechanical Romance by Alexene Farol Follmuth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bel's parents are getting a divorce and her mother has taken Bel and her older brother Luke to live in a small apartment on the other side of the city. Her maternal instincts are going overboard and she has enrolled Bel in a snooty private school, very different to the one she has studied at until now. Here everyone is into AP classes and extracurricular work and getting their college applications done, whereas Bel just wants to hang out at the Mall with her friends.

Then a last minute class project brings Bel to the attention of one of the physics teachers who sort of blackmails Bel into trying out for a place on the school's robotics team (literally Robot Wars). This kind of reminded me of when Harry Potter gets spotted as a potential seeker by Professor Mcgonagall. The robotics team is led by the school's all-round high achiever Mateo. The son of a Silicone Valley CEO gazillionaire and a former super model, he is driven to succeed at everything, football, class, robotics etc. he takes the weight of the world on him and feels personally responsible for every failure. Again, this reminded me of an old Buffy episode where a little boy is blamed by his coach for the baseball team losing a match.

Bel doesn't understand the design software the robotics team uses so she sketches out a design on paper for the deceptively simple task set for potential candidates. When Mateo sees the sketch he immediately drafts her into the team, without consulting anyone else. Personalities soon clash, especially when Bel points out that Mateo is super-controlling, he doesn't really listen to anyone else's ideas or tolerate criticism.

There's lots to unpick here: parental expectations; the differences between the haves and have-nots; the impact of divorce on family dynamics; teenage romance; misogyny; robot wars; and more. I also liked the diversity of the characters, although I also have a concern that the characters' diversity was perhaps more about references to ethnic foods and festivals with a few non-English words thrown in for good measure, rather than a faithful representation of different ethnic backgrounds. Then again, it may just be that these are teenagers born and brought up in the US wit US cultural norms sitting alongside their parents and their grandparents' ethnic background.

Anyway, there's teenage angst; romance; drama; and lots and lots of robot wars. Loved it and read it in one day.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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