Thank you to Holiday House for an e-arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

i absolutely adored olivie blake's ya debut under a different pen name with its focus on woc in stem. i found myself in eccentric bel maier, one of our two high school senior mains though definitely not as much of a mechanical engineering whiz as she is. as smart as she is, she goes through the motions in life with a lack of motivation to aim higher particularly at the start of the book with putting important things off that makes her stress even more thinking about her future. teo luna on the other hand, with being the son of a tech ceo and expectations from not just his parents but everyone around him, he works himself to the maximum in order to live up to them. but also in the beginning struggled with teamwork on their robotics team in listening to others input, so glad bel contributed to his development in realizing a lot of aspects he needed to work as a team. not just teo, both of them also struggle with a lot of weight on their shoulders in terms of expectations in making their parents happy with what they choose to do in life and where to go to college. bel with her divorced parents along with her mom asking her about college constantly and teo with his dad wanting to maintain his image.

the romance aspect of this story gave me so many butterflies, i'm just a sap for a good ya romance at times. but bel and teo were the cutest along with how they helped each other grow individually coming to realizations about choices they can make for themselves and accepting each other how they are, not being influenced by outside perspectives of who they should date. side note, particular details i personally loved, was the filipino representation! bel's mom being full filipina, making bel half, it was just so great to see tagalog and food references in ya genre that i didn't really see growing up. was endeared with the scene of bel's mom being the usual filipino mom in instantly persuading teo to eat with them. with its stem main focus my mechanical romance was everything that was needed to change things up in ya romcom genre. if you're looking for a quick read but different to one's usual ya romcom i definitely recommend picking this one up!