Once Upon a Broken Heart

I came to this one sideways, through the Caraval books, and that turned out to be the right door. I had liked the way Stephanie Garber wrote bargains that sounded sweet and cost too much, and I kept thinking about Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, who stood at the edge of those earlier books with blood on his mouth and hurt in his past. Once Upon a Broken Heart, published in 2021 by Flatiron Books at 408 pages, gives him the stage and pairs him with a girl who believes in happy endings so hard she will pay for one with her own mouth. It is the first book in its trilogy, set in the Magnificent North, after the Caraval trilogy, and you feel that history without needing a reread.

Evangeline Fox is the kind of heroine Garber loves. She grew up above her parents curiosity shop in the town of Valenda, raised on stories about Fates, doorways, and true love. Her mother died young. Her father remarried. Her stepsister Marisol is quiet and watchful. Evangeline has pink hair, pink dresses, a habit of talking to animals, and a faith that love, if noticed properly, will save her. Early pages show her buying a poisoned curiosity, writing letters she does not send, and planning a wedding she will not get. Luc, the boy she has loved since childhood, the stablehand son she has built a whole future around, agrees to marry Marisol instead. The ceremony is set. Evangeline, desperate and sleepless, does what girls in her mothers stories were warned not to do. She prays to the Prince of Hearts.

A Wedding, a Prayer, and a Price

The opening works because Garber lets Valenda feel small before she breaks it. We see the shop with its odd inventory, the pink wallpaper, the neighbors who gossip. Evangeline narrates like someone who collects omens. A cracked teacup means something. A fox at the window means something. When Luc tells her he will marry Marisol, she does not hear a practical choice or a tired boy settling. She hears theft. She convinces herself Marisol used a love potion or a spell, because the alternative, that Luc simply chose otherwise, would require her to rewrite her whole idea of being chosen.

Her prayer is answered in a church. Jacks appears with his blue hair, his apple, his smile that does not reach his eyes. In Caraval he was Legend's troubled friend, a Fate who kisses and kills. Here Garber reintroduces him cleanly for new readers. Fates are old magical beings, once locked away, now loose. Jacks is the Fate of hearts. His kiss is death to everyone except, according to rumor, his one true love. He bargains. He will stop the wedding for the price of three kisses, given at times of his choosing. Evangeline, who thinks kisses are promises, agrees because she assumes she controls the meaning. Jacks, who knows kisses are doors, agrees because he needs doors opened.

Garber writes the wedding sabotage with cruel efficiency. Evangeline expects Jacks to expose Marisol or remind Luc of true feeling. What he does is poison the air with doubt and rot. The wedding cup breaks. Guests weep blood. Luc falls ill. The stop is not romantic. It is public and ugly, and Evangeline understands too late that a Fate does not grant wishes the way a fairy godmother does. He grants the letter of the wish and keeps the spirit for himself. That turn sets the contract for the rest of the book. Every time Evangeline thinks she has bought safety, she has bought exposure.

What I liked here, and what I kept liking, is that Evangeline is not cunning. She misreads people in ways that feel young rather than stupid. She trusts Marisol because sisters should trust. She trusts Luc because first love feels like proof. She trusts Jacks because he speaks softly when she cries. If you want a heroine who schemes, you will be annoyed for fifty pages. If you accept a heroine who hopes past evidence, the story clicks.

Three Kisses and the Valory Arch

The three kisses structure the middle of the book, and Garber spaces them like traps. The first kiss comes early and does the most damage. Jacks kisses Evangeline to seal or to taste or to test, interpretations shift depending who tells it, and the Valory Arch, a great northern gate that had stayed shut for years, swings open. The Arch is one of four that once guarded the Magnificent North, built from stones tied to old magic. Its opening is news across kingdoms. Soldiers notice. Scholars notice. Princes notice. Evangeline, who only wanted Luc back, has triggered a political event.

She learns the cost in stages. Jacks cannot simply be thanked and dismissed. The bargain binds her until the third kiss is spent. He follows her, saves her when convenient, abandons her when curiosity pulls him elsewhere. Their talk is the best part of the book. He calls her Little Fox. She calls him a monster and then asks for help. He tells her love is a weakness people sell. She tells him he is wrong with a certainty that makes him laugh. Garber gives Jacks lines that are funny in a tired way, as if he has watched girls make this exact trade for centuries and still enjoys watching it happen.

The second beat lands harder because Evangeline tries to fix things by running. After Luc's fate turns grim and Valenda turns hostile, with Marisol strangely calm and neighbors whispering that Evangeline brought the curse, Evangeline accepts passage north. Marisol comes too, which complicates everything. On the ship and on the road, Evangeline meets new players. There is a vampire-like attention to blood and promises. There is talk of the Valor family, the old rulers whose Arch bears their name, and of stones that have gone missing. Evangeline, still thinking like a girl from a shop rather than a player in a succession struggle, focuses on keeping Marisol safe and winning back a boy who is no longer the point.

A fair warning belongs here. Garber's prose is perfumed. Everything glows, shimmers, tastes of honey and poison, smells of apples and roses. Doors are described by their carvings. Dresses get paragraphs. Curses feel like perfume. If you prefer spare sentences, the first hundred pages will feel sticky. I felt it too, and then I stopped minding because the plot keeps moving under the decoration. The sweetness is doing work. It makes the violence, when it arrives, land colder.

The Road to the Magnificent North

The Magnificent North is a different country from the hot streets of Caraval. Garber builds it from cold palaces, wolf shaped weather vanes, stories about northern Fates, and a court obsessed with prophecy. Evangeline arrives as a curiosity. She is the girl who opened the Arch. Some think she is blessed. Some think she stole power. Prince Apollo Acadian, the younger prince with a storybook face and a need to be loved, fixes on her quickly. He is charming in public, needy in private, and surrounded by advisors who measure every smile.

Apollo matters because he offers Evangeline the story she thought she wanted. He courts her with dances, gifts, and public favor. He tells her she looks like fate. After Luc, who chose her sister, Apollo feels like correction. A prince chooses her. The court applauds. Marisol watches. Jacks watches with more amusement and something else he will not name. Garber lets the triangle churn. Evangeline kisses Apollo and feels safe. She argues with Jacks and feels awake. She writes to Marisol and feels guilty. The pages cycle through favor, jealousy, rescue, misunderstanding, and it can feel repetitive if you read straight through. That churn is my main complaint, and I will return to it, but it also mirrors what Garber wants to say about wanting to be wanted.

Travel details keep the section alive. To enter the north properly, Evangeline must pass stones, answer riddles from guards who collect memories, and trade small truths for passage. She meets a scholar who explains the Valor Arch stones, each tied to a virtue or a crime depending on telling. She hears that several stones have been stolen and that whoever holds them can force the Arch to open or to kill. She starts to understand that her first kiss did not just open a door. It announced that the lock can be picked, and collectors are now hunting keys.

Jacks follows at a distance and then not at a distance. He saves her from a creature in the snow, then asks for payment in information. He warns her not to trust Apollo's family, then refuses to explain why. He is cruel about Luc, tender about her fear, absent when she needs a witness. The dynamic will either carry you or irritate you. I was carried because Garber never lets Jacks become safe. Even when he bandages her hand or carries her through cold, his eyes stay calculating. He needs that third kiss. He needs what it opens.

Apollo, the Court, and Nocte Stella

Court life at Wolf Hall gives Garber room for her favorite set pieces. Dinners where courses arrive under glass cloches shaped like swans. Dresses that change color when lied to. Servants who are spies. Evangeline, out of her depth, learns to smile while listening. Apollo promotes her as his favored companion, which protects her from lesser nobles and exposes her to greater ones. His brother, heir Castor, is colder and harder to read. His stepmother the queen watches Evangeline like a problem to solve.

The centerpiece is Nocte Stella, a night revel held under stars, part masquerade and part hunt. Garber has always been good at parties that turn predatory, and this is her best since Caraval. Guests wear masks that show desires. Wine is poured from bottles shaped like hearts. Music changes tempo when someone lies. Evangeline attends on Apollo's arm, wearing a gown that makes her visible in exactly the way she once dreamed. Jacks attends as himself, which at a masquerade is its own mask. Marisol attends too, quieter, paler, collecting attention she does not seem to seek.

What happens at Nocte Stella moves two plots at once. Publicly, Apollo elevates Evangeline, dancing with her past midnight, feeding court gossip that an engagement may follow. Privately, people die. A noble is found with stone dust on his hands. A guard remembers seeing someone near the Arch vault. Rumors point to a thief selling Valor stones to the highest bidder. Evangeline, who has touched Arch magic through Jacks, starts having dreams where doors speak and stones burn. She wakes with blood on her lip or frost on her window, unsure whether Jacks visited or whether the stones called her.

Garber handles the murder mystery lightly. Clues arrive through overheard talk, stolen letters, and Jacks volunteering facts that serve his aims. If you want a tight procedural, this is not it. The point is atmosphere and the slow tightening of Jacks's hold on Evangeline. Every revelation makes her more valuable and less free. Apollo needs her to legitimize his claim to northern magic. Unknown buyers need her to open what remains shut. Jacks needs her mouth. Marisol needs something Evangeline cannot name yet, and that unnamed need becomes the sharpest thread.

I should note who the book is not for. Readers who dislike love triangles will struggle, because Evangeline pines for Luc, leans on Apollo, and spars with Jacks in overlapping chapters. Readers who want hard magic rules will struggle, because Fates work by story logic, kisses open gates because kisses mean promises, rather than by cost tables. Readers who want carnage on every page will find long stretches of dresses and dances. What Garber offers instead is momentum through longing. Someone always wants something from Evangeline, and she keeps giving it to stay loved.

Stones, Poison, and the Choice

The last quarter tightens. Evangeline learns more about the Valor stones and why they matter. The Arches were built to protect the north, each stone holding part of a seal. Remove stones and the Arch weakens. Force it with Fate magic and it opens but sickens. Her first kiss with Jacks did both. It proved the seal could be broken and left a wound that others can widen. Scholars argue over whether to replace stones or destroy the Arch. Princes argue over who commands what opens. Jacks argues, in his way, that Evangeline should stop trusting princes.

Apollo's arc turns darker here and Garber does not soften him fully. He is sweet when adored and brittle when doubted. He begs Evangeline to say she will stay, then suspects her when she hesitates. A poisoning plot touches the court. Apollo is cursed or poisoned depending on which advisor speaks, struck by a malady that makes his blood run cold and his temper run hot. Some say a Valor stone was ground into his cup. Some say a Fate laid hands on him. Evangeline is asked to help cure him, and the cure, like everything in this world, requires a price. She must choose between giving Jacks his third kiss on his terms, which will open something she cannot close, or watching Apollo fade while the court blames her as the Arch opener who brought ruin north.

Marisol's role sharpens in these chapters and reframes earlier ones. The quiet stepsister is not simply sweet. She made her own bargains to survive Valenda and the voyage. She knows more about Luc's wedding and about northern buyers than she admitted. Without spoiling the exact exchange, the sisters confront each other about who was loved and who performed being loved. Evangeline has to face that she cast Marisol as villain to protect her own story. Marisol has to face that she let Evangeline pay costs she did not understand. It is the most honest stretch in the book, brief and painful, and it makes Evangeline easier to forgive for earlier blindness.

The cliffhanger, and readers should know this is a first volume that ends on a cut, involves Apollo, poison, and Evangeline's choice. Apollo, dying or damned, needs a cure that only a true love act or a Fate bargain can supply. Jacks offers a path that will save Apollo but will bind Evangeline tighter and will spend that final kiss. Evangeline, who opened the book begging a Fate to stop a wedding, closes it by deciding what a kiss is for. She chooses, the kiss lands, Apollo lives or seems to live, and the cost arrives immediately in a form she did not foresee. The Arch reacts. The stones burn. A door that should stay shut shudders. The final pages leave her engaged to a prince she is not sure she loves, indebted to a Fate she is not sure she hates, and hunted by people who now know her blood or breath can work locks.

That ending frustrated me in the good way. It resolves the court poisoning enough to feel like progress while opening a larger trap around the Arches and Fates. It also confirms Garber's theme. Happy endings in this world are not found. They are bought, and the seller sets the exchange rate after you agree.

Criticism belongs alongside praise because this book divides readers sharply. The love triangle churn wears thin around the middle. Evangeline forgives Apollo too fast, doubts Jacks too slowly, remembers Luc at convenient moments, and the cycle repeats through three balls and two rescues. The prose, gorgeous at first, can smother. Garber describes fabric, food, and blushes at length while fights end in a paragraph. The mystery of the stolen stones never gets the room a mystery needs, with suspects introduced late and motives stated rather than shown. If you want efficient plotting, look elsewhere.

Still, the strengths held me. Jacks is a genuine creation, funny and rotten and sad, a Fate who collects teeth and regrets in equal measure. Evangeline grows without hardening into someone else. She starts as a girl who thinks hope is a plan and ends as a young woman who knows hope has fees. The Magnificent North feels distinct from Caraval's hot game, colder and more formal, with its own folklore about Valors and Arches. For readers who like romantasy where kisses have consequences and parties hide knives, this delivers. For readers who bounced off Caraval for its repetition, this will test you the same way, only prettier.

I finished it thinking about doors. Evangeline spent the book opening them for others. The next volume will ask whether she can close one for herself. That question, plus Jacks waiting to collect what kisses owe, was enough to make me pick up the sequel. If you start, know what you buy. A fairy tale with teeth, a heroine who learns slowly, a prince who shines and cracks, and a Fate who smiles while the price ticks up.