Tag Archives: Once Upon a Broken Heart

Review: The Ballad of Never After by Stephanie Garber

Book Review and Content, Fantasy, Romance, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , ,
The Ballad of Never After by Stephanie Garber

The Ballad of Never After (Once Upon a Broken Heart #2)
Stephanie Garber
Flatiron Books
Published September 13, 2022

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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.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. All opinions are my own.

Review: A Curse for True Love by Stephanie Garber

Book Review and Content, Fantasy, Romance, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , , ,

A Curse for True Love (Once Upon a Broken Heart #3)
Stephanie Garber
Flatiron Books
Published October 24, 2023

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About A Curse for True Love

Two villains, one girl, and a deadly battle for happily ever after.

Evangeline Fox ventured to the Magnificent North in search of her happy ending, and it seems as if she has it. She’s married to a handsome prince and lives in a legendary castle. But Evangeline has no idea of the devastating price she’s paid for this fairytale. She doesn’t know what she has lost, and her husband is determined to make sure she never finds out . . . but first he must kill Jacks, the Prince of Hearts.

Blood will be shed, hearts will be stolen, and true love will be put to the test in A Curse for True Love, the breathlessly anticipated conclusion to the Once Upon A Broken Heart trilogy.

My Review

After reading the first two books in the series, I wanted to know how Evangeline and Jacks would navigate the obstacles standing between them and whether they could craft their own happily ever after.

I wasn’t expecting some of the directions the series takes. There was a character who seemed like a pretty decent person, perhaps a bit spoiled, but who was beginning to make better choices. Then he took a hard right into serious evil, and I had to recalibrate how I thought about him. Which is okay—it just came as a bit of a surprise.

I can’t decide if I’m starting to outgrow the Bad Boy stories where someone has a pretty long list of wrongs and callous actions to their name, but somehow, I’m still rooting for the heroine to find a way to be with this person. I like Jacks, but I sometimes cringed at the way he treated other people. Reading certain scenes definitely required some willing suspension of disbelief as Evangeline, whose lost memories left her incredibly vulnerable and who knew someone was trying to kill her, didn’t question the reckless stranger who kept appearing out of nowhere.

I did appreciate the romantic tension between them and the continued themes about curses and true love in the fairytale-esque world Garber created. I love the way that the magic works, especially with regard to curses taking a life of their own and stories continually changing with each telling or reading.

All in all, I am glad to have stuck with the series all the way to the end. It was fun reading something so swoony and romantic. I think romantasy fans will like the sweeping fairytale magic of the story world and Evangeline’s starry-eyed commitment to find her happily ever after.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Main characters are white.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl. In one scene, a boy and girl begin to undress one another. They fall asleep before getting fully undressed.

Spiritual Content
A group of immortal Fates have limited special abilities. The story also contains vampires. Some humans have the ability to perform spells or curses, which require magic to be broken.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. Evangeline hears about a wolf attack that leaves a boy horribly scarred. A boy dies, apparently from some kind of poison. Someone poisons a girl. A large number of vampires bite people. Someone ties up another person and threatens to torture or kill them. A person starts a fire, endangering others’ lives. Someone punches a man repeatedly, breaking his nose and bruising his face.

Drug Content
Evangeline drinks wine at a social event.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.