Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber

Hi, y’all! I’m back this week to share a fabulous book! This week I’m reviewing Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber!

Here’s the blurb before I continue:

For as long as she can remember, Evangeline Fox has believed in true love and happy endings... until she learns that the love of her life will marry another.

Desperate to stop the wedding and to heal her wounded heart, Evangeline strikes a deal with the charismatic but wicked Prince of Hearts. In exchange for his help, he asks for three kisses, to be given at the time and place of his choosing.

But after Evangeline’s first promised kiss, she learns that bargaining with an immortal is a dangerous game—and that the Prince of Hearts wants far more from her than she’d pledged. He has plans for Evangeline, plans that will either end in the greatest happily ever after or the most exquisite tragedy…

Here we go! I absolutely love this book! I ate it up and finished reading it quickly, so I am very glad that book two is out! There are so many things to rant about in this book, so for the sake of keeping this review relatively short, I’ll only rant about a few. First, the most obvious, I loved the fairytale aspect of this book. Everything in the book was projected and told in a manner that could only be described as a fairytale! I haven’t seen a book with this type of storytelling before, so I was fascinated. The world-building was also quite clever in this book. The setting of the novel is contained in a relatively small area proportionally to the world, so there isn’t a lot of world-building and information dumping. I found that this helped retain the fairytale-esque quality of the novel.

Then there are the characters! I loved the idea of the Fates in the novel and got so excited when new ones were introduced, but of course one of my favorites was Jacks. Though there were quite a few times in the novel where I wanted to smack him. Evangeline was also a surprisingly likable character. I feel like classically stereotypical female characters in fairytales have certain qualities that make me dislike them. One of these qualities is the “damsel in distress” personality. In OUABH, I feel like Stephanie Garber took out these qualities, while still keeping Evangeline the kind and sincere main character that frequents fairytales and was necessary for the plot. Not to mention, I love the contrast between Jacks’ character and Evangeline’s. Seeing them change and grow together over the course of OUABH was so much fun, and man did the ending rip out a bit of my heart. That will never stop me though! Now that I have been hooked, I will see this series through! Once Upon a Broken Heart has somehow managed to find its way to a five-star review. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone all at once!

Happy Reading!

Renee