The morally gray love interest is one of romance’s most reliable pleasures, and the reason is not complicated: there is something deeply satisfying about a character who operates entirely outside the rules of good behavior and somehow still makes you root for him. Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart commits to this premise with its whole chest. The Prince of Hearts is not redeemable in the ways we usually expect. He is something stranger and more interesting than that.
Evangeline Fox, the heroine, is doing what desperate heroines have always done — making a deal she knows is probably a mistake because the alternative is worse. The alternative here is watching the boy she loves marry someone else. The price Jacks, the Prince of Hearts, demands is three kisses. What those kisses will do, and to whom, and why — that is the machinery the book sets in motion. Garber is a writer who understands that the best fantasy romance plots are not puzzles to be solved but feelings to be inhabited, and she structures the mystery here to keep Evangeline (and the reader) perpetually off-balance in the most pleasurable way.
What this book does particularly well is the slow contamination of Evangeline’s perspective. She is not naive — she understands that Jacks is dangerous. What she doesn’t anticipate is the way his particular brand of danger starts to feel like the most honest thing in her world. The other characters are performing versions of safety and goodness; Jacks is simply himself, which turns out to be its own kind of seductive. Garber builds the attraction not through grand gestures but through accumulation — small moments of unexpected recognition, exchanges that shouldn’t mean anything and clearly mean everything.
The world-building here draws on a fairy-tale-adjacent aesthetic that feels closer to a fever dream than a secondary world fantasy. There are Fates, ancient and capricious; there is a city that feels like it is always being watched; there are consequences to magic that are never fully explained because they were never meant to be understood. It is atmospheric in the way that the best gothic romance is atmospheric — you are meant to feel slightly unmoored, which is precisely how Evangeline feels, which is precisely the point.
The audiobook for this series is genuinely beautiful — the narrator captures the dreamy, slightly disoriented quality of Garber’s prose in a way that makes the experience feel like being read to by someone who knows exactly how unsettling the story is and is enjoying it thoroughly.
If you came to this subgenre through A Court of Thorns and Roses and found yourself most drawn to the scenes where the love interest was at his most unpredictable, this is the book that was written for that specific appetite. Readers who responded to the “is he actually safe?” tension in From Blood and Ash will find a different flavor of that same unease here — Garber’s version is more whimsical in its aesthetics but no less pointed in its emotional stakes.
What Once Upon a Broken Heart is actually about, underneath all the bargains and the Fates and the fairy-tale scaffolding, is the specific experience of wanting someone you have every reason not to trust. That experience doesn’t require a magical world to be real. Garber just found the perfect costume for it.