The Ballad of Never After

The Ballad of Never After is the second novel of Stephanie Garber's Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, published in 2022 by Flatiron Books, St. Martin's Press and Hodder & Stoughton, among others. It picks up the bargain from the first book at the point where Evangeline Fox has every reason to walk away from it, having learned in the first book what his help costs.

She does not walk away, because a curse has been set loose and the only way to break it runs through the Prince of Hearts. The two of them travel together through magic, lost stories and worse company, and neither of them is honest about why they keep going. The journey replaces the first book's wedding with a road, which forces the pair to keep choosing each other rather than being thrown together by circumstances neither of them controls.

Garber keeps the narration with Evangeline, so the reader sees the north's rules from inside them and learns the Prince of Hearts' history at the same pace she does, and the bargains she has already made keep changing what she is allowed to do. The story turns on the question of whether either of them can be trusted with the answer to the curse rather than on whether the curse can be lifted at all.

The novel ends on a choice that the third book has to live with, and it is the middle volume of a trilogy rather than a self-contained story. The middle volume is also where the north's history and the Prince of Hearts' own past become part of the plot rather than background, and A Curse for True Love followed in 2023 to close the series.