Once Upon a Broken Heart
A woman makes a dark bargain with a paranormal being to save her shattered heart and reshape her destiny. The price is steep and the consequences spiral in unexpected directions. She discovers that magic and desire are far more complicated than she ever imagined.
Everything You Need to Know About Once Upon a Broken Heart
Evangeline Fox believes in fairy tales right up until the boy she loves gets engaged to her stepsister. Desperate to stop the wedding, she goes to Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, a Fate with a lethal kiss and a reputation for ruining everyone who bargains with him. His price sounds almost reasonable: three kisses, to be collected whenever and from whomever he chooses. Jacks stops the wedding his way, by turning the entire ceremony to stone and letting Evangeline take the blame.
The fallout carries her north to the Magnificent North, the storybook kingdom where Prince Apollo is choosing a bride during the week of Nocte Neverending. Evangeline keeps trying to build an honest life. Jacks keeps appearing to collect, and every debt he calls in tightens a web she cannot see the shape of. Garber writes it like a fairy tale with the warning label still attached: charming boys with ancient agendas, kisses as currency, and a heroine whose hopefulness is both her flaw and her power.
Jacks is one of the best antiheroes in recent YA. He is cruel and self-serving and genuinely charming, so you hate him and root for him at the same time. The worldbuilding of Garber's Caraval universe expands here, with the Fates as a class of powerful, amoral beings who play with mortals for sport. The pacing is relentless.
Evangeline's perspective is clever. She is smart and resourceful, trying to outmaneuver someone centuries older and inherently more powerful. The romance is toxic on purpose, thrilling rather than aspirational, and Garber commits to the moral ambiguity. Nobody is pure here. That is the whole point.
Emotional manipulation and toxic relationships. Coercion (magical consent issues). Violence and death. Blood magic and dark themes. References to obsession and unhealthy love.
The stone curse comes undone, but nothing Jacks touches stays clean. Apollo's whirlwind obsession with Evangeline is not real. Jacks has been aiming the prince at her the entire time, and the royal courtship is a means to an end.
The end is the Valory Arch. Jacks needs it opened, Evangeline is the rare key who can do it, and the wedding is the final piece of his setup. On the night she marries Apollo, the prince is struck down into a cursed, deathlike sleep, and Evangeline is left tied to her bargain and to Jacks, whose game is only getting started. The Ballad of Never After picks up from exactly that wreckage.
Essential for Caraval fans, this expands the universe significantly and sets up future books. For readers who love morally gray romance and don't need their love interests to be good people. If you liked A Court of Thorns and Roses for the toxic-dynamic appeal and the fae mythology, this hits similar notes. Not for you if you need relationship dynamics to model healthy behavior or if you want your protagonists to make objectively good decisions.
First book of the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, followed by The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love. It is set in the Caraval universe a few years after those books. You do not need Caraval first, but it deepens Jacks and the lore of the Fates. The trilogy is complete.
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