The Ballad of Never After

Image credit: Bruna.nl

Well it’s official. I have been cursed to be unable to physically put down this trilogy, having just finished the second book in a record 3 days. Either that or these books are just that compelling! The second instalment in Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy proves to be even more thrilling, decadent, and enticing than its predecessor, with new curses, new betrayals, and new complications obscuring Evangaline Fox’s road to finding her happy ending.

After Jacks’ latest betrayal, Evangeline is determined to never trust him again and hopes that with her own special magic, she might still be able to get her happy ending that Jack’s took away. Apollo is not dead, merely in a suspended state and Evangeline devotes her time to trying to find the magical means to wake him. That is until he wakes up on his own and promptly tries to kill her. But it’s not really him. Apollo has been cursed. With time against her, Evangeline finds herself again entering into a tentative partnership with Jacks to find four magical stones and open the Valory Arch: the only thing that can break the curse on Apollo and save them both.

Gripping excitement from the first page, The Ballad of Never After has more sinister curses, more betrayals, and more plot twists that keep the fingers flying. Now that introductions are out of the way, the story gets into the nitty gritty of who these characters are and what they desire, all of which is being shaped by the events taking place around them.

Where the first book sampled the Cinderella story with the wicked stepmother and the manipulative stepsister, this book follows the story of Beauty and the Beast with the central relationship between Evangeline and Jacks taking on a much more solid shape. The tragedy of a doomed romance is at very heavy play here, along with the exploration of love by exposure.

Evangeline becomes a strange sort of heroine, as she begins to think more with her heart rather than her head and drives the story with her impulsive actions that only prompt internal consideration at their most dramatic moments. One would think that, at this stage, she’d give up on the North and go back to the Meridian Empire where she might be able to find a nice boy, settle down, and have a comfortable ever after (until Jacks’ cashes in on the final kiss she owes).  Between her first love who’s now a vampire and has tried to kill her once, her husband who was bewitched to love her and then cursed to hunt her down and kill her, and her fast-becoming true love who is an Immortal Fate and the source of all her current misfortunes, Eva’s track record for heroic fairytale males is not great. But of course, it’s all this emotional turmoil that comes with these characters that makes the story so compelling.

The world becomes bigger, brighter, and sometimes more beautiful, as the protagonists venture further into the Magnificent North on their quest to find the stones. The quest narrative then gives Garber a fantastic avenue in which to dole out the history and lore of this magical world, extending its beauty and fantasy as well as revealing some of its more terrible and tragic aspects.

Garber’s dramatic and saccharine prose continues to make every sentence positively drip with syrupy, fantasy vibes, made a little more adult and exciting with the introduction of sex. Even sex in the Magnificent North is dramatic, romantic, and dangerous and at times the book takes on a new and exciting vibe of teasing, mild erotica.

Image credit: YALLFest

The Ballad of Never After is a very exciting and compelling sequel that has definitely gotten me completely hooked. Filled with action, adventure, romance, tragedy, magic, and marvelous dresses, I can’t wait to see how it ends.

Author: Stephanie Garber, 2022

Published: Hodder and Stoughton, an imprint of the Hachette UK Company, Great Britain, 2022. Pictured edition published 2023.

The Ballad For Never After is the second book in Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy.