Stephanie Garber Books

Stephanie Garber spent years as the writer almost nobody wanted, drafting novels that went unsold while she taught creative writing and kept going anyway. Then Caraval sold, published in January 2017, became an instant bestseller in dozens of countries, and turned her into one of YA fantasy's most bankable names. That long apprenticeship shows in her plotting: Garber writes like someone who learned exactly how many rugs she can pull out from under a reader before they stop trusting the floor, and then pulls one more.

Caraval follows sisters Scarlett and Tella Dragna, who escape their brutal father for Caraval, a legendary traveling game run by the mysterious showman Legend, where the audience plays, nothing is guaranteed to be real, and the prize is a wish. Legendary and Finale completed the trilogy, handing the second book to Tella, the more chaotic and more entertaining sister. The series' signature is atmosphere: dresses that re-stitch themselves to match your mood, shops that sell secrets, magic that always charges interest. Logic is not the point. Sensation is the point.

Her second series is the one that conquered BookTok. Once Upon a Broken Heart, which began in 2021, stars Evangeline Fox, a hope-drunk romantic who makes a bargain with Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, a fate whose kiss kills and whose ethics are decorative. Across The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love, their slow entanglement made Jacks one of the defining book boyfriends of the era, a genuinely unsettling love interest the fandom adopted anyway. The companion novella Spectacular followed in 2024, and a new illustrated novella, The Mirror of Infinite Endings, arrives in September 2026. In 2025 she also opened a new, slightly older-skewing series with Alchemy of Secrets, featuring folklore student Holland St. James, a hidden bank, and a figure called the Watch Man.

Honesty time: Garber's plots do not survive cross-examination. Rules bend when the story needs them to, twists stack until some readers get whiplash, and characters occasionally forget information because remembering it would end the book early. Her fans know all this and do not care, because nobody currently writes enchantment, the actual feeling of it, better than she does.

For romantasy readers she is an interesting case: maximum romance, minimum spice. Heat level is a 1, kisses carry the weight other books assign to entire chapters, and the tension comes from wanting, not having. That makes her the perfect on-ramp for readers who love fated, doomed, capital-R Romance but are not shopping for explicit content, and a palate cleanser for everyone else between five-chili fae books.

Garber also sits at the center of the special edition economy that now drives publishing. Her releases arrive in waves of retailer exclusives, sprayed edges, foiled boards, and subscription box variants that resell for multiples of cover price, and collectors treat a full Caraval set the way other people treat vinyl pressings. More interesting is how her books traveled: Caraval was shelved YA, but the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy became a genuine all-ages phenomenon, handed upward from teenagers to their mothers and sideways across BookTok to adult romantasy readers who normally demand more spice and made an exception for Jacks. That crossover, romance-first fantasy with no explicit content conquering an adult audience, is a data point the whole industry noticed.

Where to start: Caraval if you want the full experience in order, since the Once Upon a Broken Heart books happen in the same world and reward returning readers with cameos. If you are here purely because the internet yelled about Jacks, you can start with Once Upon a Broken Heart and backfill later. The internet, for the record, was right about Jacks.