The Ballad of Never After (Once Upon a Broken Heart #2)
Stephanie Garber
Flatiron Books
Published September 13, 2022
Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads
About The Ballad of Never After
Not every love is meant to be.
After Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, betrays her, Evangeline Fox swears she’ll never trust him again. Now that she’s discovered her own magic, Evangeline believes she can use it to restore the chance at happily ever after that Jacks stole away.
But when a new terrifying curse is revealed, Evangeline finds herself entering into a tenuous partnership with the Prince of Hearts again. Only this time, the rules have changed. Jacks isn’t the only force Evangeline needs to be wary of. In fact, he might be the only one she can trust, despite her desire to despise him.
Instead of a love spell wreaking havoc on Evangeline’s life, a murderous spell has been cast. To break it, Evangeline and Jacks will have to do battle with old friends, new foes, and a magic that plays with heads and hearts. Evangeline has always trusted her heart, but this time she’s not sure she can…
My Review
Evangeline embarks on another wild adventure, determined to break the curse over her husband, Prince Apollo. I couldn’t decide if I liked Apollo or not. I think we just don’t get enough time with him on scene and without the interference of a spell of some kind for me to figure out what kind of person he is.
Jacks, however, gets a lot of time on scene, and he’s definitely got the brooding, tortured soul thing going. I like that he and Evangeline play off one another and work well together.
This book builds a lot of sexual tension between those two. I liked that the story doesn’t stay too long in the land of miscommunication or depend too entirely on Jacks and Evangeline not saying what they mean. There are other forces at play that impact what she feels for Jacks and what she thinks he feels as well. There’s also a fair amount of back and forth between Evangeline and Apollo. She feels guilty for the bad things that have happened to him and wants to break the curses binding them together. But the longer time goes on, the more confused she is about her feelings for him.
The Ballad of Never After offers more details and lore from the lush fantasy landscape introduced in the first book in the series. We start to see how the different pieces of fairytale stories that Evangeline grew up with fit together and the connections between the people around her, all of whom need her for something. As soon as I finished this book, I started reading the series finale.
Content Notes
Recommended for Ages 16 up.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used infrequently.
Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing and some strong sexual tension between two characters. At one point, a girl has injuries to her back, and someone bandages her while she is topless.
Spiritual Content
Lots of curses and a bit of fairytale magic. A few characters are vampires.
Violent Content
Situations of peril. Vampires feed on or threaten to feed on humans in a few scenes. Someone continually hunts another person, intending to kill them. Two people are cursed with a mirror curse, meaning that when one is injured, the same injury appears on the other person. In one scene, someone scratches a message on their skin with a knife tip. Someone answers the message in a similar fashion. Someone stabs a girl in the chest, killing her.
Drug Content
Evangeline drinks champagne at an evening party.
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