A Curse for True Love

A Curse for True Love is the third and final novel of Stephanie Garber's Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, published in 2023 by Flatiron Books, St. Martin's Press and Hodder & Stoughton. It opens with Evangeline Fox apparently holding the ending she was promised: a husband, a castle in the Magnificent North and a story that everyone else recognises as a happy ending.

What she does not have is any memory of how she got there or what it cost her. Her husband, the prince she is married to, would prefer it stayed that way, and the first item on his list is killing the Prince of Hearts. Evangeline therefore has to work out her own history while the two of them are moving against each other, and the villain of the piece is not the only person in the book keeping something from her.

The novel pays off the bargains made across the trilogy, and it turns on the question of what is left of true love once it has been used as currency by everyone holding it. Garber keeps the narration with Evangeline even while she is missing the context, which means the reader spends the book with someone who does not know what she has lost.

It is the closing volume of a three-book story and it assumes both earlier novels have been read. Garber's Caraval series sits in the same world, and the two trilogies share characters and a setting, though each can be followed on its own.