The Ballad of Never After by Stephanie Garber (Flatiron Books, 2022) is the second installment in the young adult fantasy series Once Upon a Broken Heart (2021). Set in the same universe as Garber’s New York Times best-selling Caraval series, The Ballad of Never After continues the journey of Evangeline Fox as she grapples with her feelings for a Fate and her destiny to open a door to ancient magic. The book was a 2022 Goodreads Choice Award finalist and #1 New York Times bestseller, as well as an Indie Next pick. Stephanie Garber is a full-time novelist who pens sweeping tales of romance and fantasy for young readers. She lives in California. This guide follows the 2022 Flatiron edition of The Ballad of Never After.

Content Warning: The books and this guide contain discussions of manipulative or abusive relationships, violence, and substance abuse and allusions to sexual assault.

Plot Summary

The Ballad of Never After picks up shortly after the end of Once Upon a Broken Heart. At the close of the prequel, Evangeline Fox learned that her husband, Prince Apollo, was put into an enchanted stasis sleep by Jacks, the Fate she thought she could trust. In search of a way to wake Apollo without Jacks’s help, Evangeline visits her friend LaLa, another Fate, who tells Evangeline to open the Valory Arch—the ancient door rumored to hold powerful magic of the former ruling family of the Magnificent North. Fearful of what Jacks will do with the power the arch holds, Evangeline searches for another way to wake Apollo, but before she can find one, Apollo wakes up on his own.

Somehow, the enchanted sleep was broken by the placing of two additional curses on Apollo and, by extension, Evangeline (curses placed by LaLa, as the book later reveals). A mirror curse means that Evangeline’s and Apollo’s lives are linked—any harm that comes to one will befall the other—and the curse of the archer forces Apollo to hunt Evangeline, as happens in the (fictionally famous) tale “The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox.” With Jacks’s help, Evangeline escapes Apollo’s attempts at murder by hiding in the palace of the vampire Chaos.

To open the Valory Arch, Evangeline will need four stones in addition to her own magical blood. The search brings Evangeline and Jacks to a party at LaLa’s new home, where Jacks is overprotective and possessive of Evangeline. Evangeline finds one of the stones and realizes that one of the guests has another. When Evangeline confronts the guest, the girl reveals herself as another key capable of opening the Valory Arch and warns Evangeline not to let herself be used. In self-defense, Evangeline kills the girl, and as she grieves her action, lacerations open across her back. Someone is torturing Apollo, and the mirror curse means that Evangeline is wounded too.

Jacks rushes Evangeline to the Hollow, an enchanted inn that is immune to all curses and is his childhood home. There, Jacks is tender and gentle toward Evangeline, and she realizes that she’s falling in love with him, even as she tells herself not to. Soon, Evangeline discovers that Jacks has the fourth stone, and though the stone is making the Hollow feel safe, Evangeline can’t stay knowing that it’s an illusion. She takes the stone, hoping it will make her feelings for Jacks fade, but it doesn’t.

Jacks and Evangeline return to Chaos’s palace, where Jacks tells Evangeline that he doesn’t want to open the Valory Arch. Instead, he wants the four stones so that he can use them to go back in time to the one girl his fated kiss didn’t kill. Overcome with grief at the idea of forgetting Jacks, Evangeline vows to change his mind. After she opens the arch, she joins Chaos inside, where the helmet he was cursed to wear is removed, and he feeds on Evangeline, nearly killing her. Jacks arrives too late to save her, and she dies in his arms.

Determined not to live without Evangeline, Jacks uses the stones to return to shortly before the arch was opened. He convinces Evangeline to run after giving Chaos access to the arch. Not remembering what happened before, Evangeline again concludes that she needs to tell Jacks that she loves him so that he won’t reverse time. On her way to find him, she encounters Apollo, who uses unknown magic to remove her recent memories, including everything about Jacks. Evangeline ends the book uncertain and afraid as Apollo vows to never let her go.