A review by bookrecsplease
The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen

4.0

This is probably the strangest romance book I’ve ever read. Between the self-proclaimed weird protagonists, bizarre situations they live in, and the constant contradictions of the FMC, it was all so…weird. It’s also of the most uniquely structured romance books I’ve ever read. Overall, it took me a minute to adjust to the strangeness of Ursula’s world, then I came to really like her, then to really like Rafael, but then when the author went from more day-to-day scenes and to jumping forward in time really quick with just pausing for brief scenes here and there, I started to lose that connection to the protagonists. I felt like I started to lose track of their personalities, in part because I think Ursula changed a lot through the whole Arc process and everything that transpired afterwards, and in part because the time of the book was moving too fast. We went from her being so incredibly insecure in her job to her being comfortable swearing out her boss over a disagreement and I was left feeling like I didn’t know when she had become so different. And the way she kept engaging in more and more contradictions of her principles of anti-capitalism and billionaires threw me for a loop. I felt like my the end I just didn’t know her character anymore, whereas at the beginning we got such a good view of how silly, smart, caring, and principled she was before most of that seemed to change so rapidly off-page. I started to like Ursula less and less.
I thought the simultaneous dual POV that was often used was perfect for getting into the nitty gritty of every up and down of the relationship, which I truly loved reading - it got so much deeper into those trenches than most other romance books.