Heart of Iron (Ashley Poston, 2018)

Heart of Iron is a YA girl-meets-robot romance novel. Like Cinder, it takes a familiar tale (in this case Anastasia the Russian princess) and cleverly up-ends expectations and tropes. Like The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, it is annoyingly mopey about true love. (Note to aspiring authors, The Princess Bride “owns" musing about twue luv. So move on.) A guilty pleasure for a STEM girl but no real teachable moments- plus it loses points for the bait-and-switch ending for the sequel. Not everything has to be a Game of Thrones multi-volume epic.