Title: Once Upon a Broken Heart (Once Upon a Broken Heart#1)
Author: Stephanie Garber
Genre: Fantasy, young adult fantasy
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication Date: 2021
Format: Audiobook
Length: 10 hours

Read if you like: Fairy tales, myths, murder mysteries, self-discovery, the pursuit of true love, magic setting

Rating: 

I’ve seen the Once Upon a Broken Heart series all over Instagram which is what spurred me to give it a try. The premise is very whimsical, taking the slant of a fairy tale gone awry, with a heroine who is focused on finding her one true love and her happily ever after.

I did enjoy this book, but it felt very young adult (which it is, so it’s not like I wasn’t warned). The heroine, Evangeline, is a girl obsessed with stories and happy endings, so much so that she tends to be a little ignorant of her surroundings or the ramifications of her decisions. She learns the hard way that real life isn’t like the stories and spends much of the narrative attempting to re-write her path and the mistakes she’s made along the way. I enjoyed this approach, though at times I felt like Evangeline didn’t have as much depth as I wanted her to. That said, given that this is a multi-book series, I think based on the foreshadowing it’s 100% possible that this was intentional and that she’ll grow a lot in the future. It almost felt similar to ACOTAR and the way Feyre feels a little shallow in book one but has a ton of potential that’s explored later down the line. 

As an audiobook, it was entertaining, but the narrator was a touch dramatic, and it took me some adjusting to get used to. I did enjoy this story, and feel like there was potential for it to head in really interesting directions, so I am continuing with the next book. I think this series has a lot of promise, and for a young adult audience, I can absolutely see why it’s so popular. It’s a perfect piece for a young/new adult looking for a hopeless romantic, a bad boy, and a bunch of whimsy all mixed into one. 

Fair warning: there may be mild spoilers ahead for those who have not read this book.

The Book: Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber

Once Upon a Broken Heart is the story of Evangeline Fox, a hopeless romantic and believer in fairy tales who has learned that her (perceived) true love is engaged to be married to none other than her step-sister. In a desperate bid to stop the wedding and get her true love back, Evangeline makes a deal with Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, who is a wicked Immortal Fate. He offers her help in exchange for three kisses that must be given at a time of his choosing, and she accepts.

She immediately regrets her decision when Jacks decides that “stopping the wedding” can be accomplished by turning her step-sister and former lover to stone. Unable to live with this as the outcome of her choice, Evangeline chooses to free them by instead accepting a fate of stone for herself. She accomplishes this and is immediately encased in stone for weeks before someone can save her.

When she returns to her normal form, she comes to find out that the marriage between her stepsister Marisol and her true love Luc never happened. Despite her hoping Luc would come to pine for her, she learns that he and Marisol tried to get married again in her absence, but Luc had been attacked by wolves and hadn’t been seen since. In the time since the previous attempt at marriage, Marisol had become known as “the cursed bride” who could not successfully wed, and Evangeline feels an unbelievable amount of guilt over this, particularly as she has become known as “Valenda’s Saviour” for having saved Marisol and Luc, as no one is aware she put them in danger in the first place. She vows to make it right in whatever way she can.

Shortly after learning this, the Empress of the North, Scarlett, invites Evangeline to tea where she and her sister ask her to travel to the capital of the North, Valorfell, and partake in an event called Nocte Neverending. Nocte Neverending is an event where the current prince of Valorfell chooses a bride, so Evangeline takes Marisol with her in hopes it will both cheer her up and help with her reputation. When they arrive, they meet many nobles, including Prince Apollo, before Jacks also arrives and immediately cashes in Evangeline’s first kiss, forcing her to kiss Prince Apollo. This starts a whirlwind courtship that sees Apollo immediately fall in love with Evangeline, asking her to marry him, which she accepts.

Evangeline quickly comes to believe that despite it seeming as though this is her perfect happily ever after, all is not as it seems. Apollo’s love is more like obsession, which she learns is because he has been cursed. Jacks agrees to help her free him from the curse, but only if she helps him by using her second kiss on a woman named Lady Fortuna, who has a secret vault that Jacks wants access to. In this vault, Evangeline learns of archways called the Valor Arches, which are magical structures with immense power that many have sworn to keep sealed. Lady Fortuna also reveals that Evangeline seems to be the prophesized one to be able to open the arches, something that Fortuna is desperate to prevent.

After this, Evangeline returns to the castle, where she’s to wed Apollo. Jacks agrees that at the end of the wedding, he will ensure her kiss breaks his obsessive spell. She does as he instructs, but the action kills Apollo instead of breaking the curse, and she’s immediately blamed for it. She begins to cry uncontrollably, and when Jacks finds her, he indicates that the tears are evidence that she too has been poisoned. He whisks her away to meet with another Fate, Chaos, who he believes will have answers. 

From here, they’ll grapple with Chaos (who is a vampire) to determine what he knows, while also trying to hunt down who it was that killed Apollo. Evangeline will need to determine who has betrayed her, what role they have in bigger schemes, how she’s related to the Valor Arches, and whether or not Jacks is friend or foe. 

The Review

There’s a lot that happens in this book. A huge amount of ground is covered, including multiple continents, a whole slew of different types of magic and creatures, and a big prophecy. 

The premise, being the belief in fairy tales and true love, was a part of what made the book feel very YA. Evangeline had this total devotion to the notion that true love was real and everyone gets happy endings, and as a result of that, her hardships feel softened as she’s always looking for a bright side or a positive resolution. This isn’t a bad thing, it just was the nature of the book, and it informed directionally how the characters would relate with each other. 

In terms of the characters, Evangeline felt a bit shallow to me, but again I think this may be just because she has growth potential in coming books. Her actions and mentality are consistent with her devotion and belief in fairy tales and true love, but I wanted to see more complexity in her. I think there’s lots of room for her to grow. 

I also felt like Jacks was very much still a mystery. He seemed a little one-note, but there are small places where it seems like the foreshadowing is indicating that he’s much more complicated than we’re being led to believe. I didn’t fully trust Evangeline’s depiction of him at the end because much of her perception seemed to be based on assumptions that she couldn’t know for certain. 

The amount that was going on in the plot had me rewinding my audiobook occasionally if I wasn’t paying really good attention. All of a sudden a new fate or creature or aspect of magic would be introduced and if I wasn’t focused, I found I needed to go back and relisten to ensure I had a good grasp on the events. That’s probably also my fault since I tend to listen to audiobooks at a 1.7X speed. 

I enjoyed this book, found it to be easy listening and best of all, I think there’s some potential in the extensive set-up to various aspects of the plot that could lead to interesting twists and turns as the series proceeds. I’ve jumped into The Ballad of Never After and am finding more growth in both Evangeline and Jacks already, so while this book was more lukewarm for me, I think there are lots of interesting places the series can go from here.