57 pages • 1 hour read
Stephanie GarberThe Ballad of Never After
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Literary Context: The Caraval Universe
The Ballad of Never After is the second book in the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, which is set in the world of the Caraval trilogy, Garber’s New York Times best-selling fairy-tale fantasy series. Jacks and Evangeline made brief appearances in Finale (2019), the third in the Caraval trilogy, in which Evangeline was turned to stone before being sent on the mission to the Magnificent North that she undertakes in Once Upon a Broken Heart. As a representative from the south, Evangeline was to attend Nocte Neverending, the northern event at which the prince would choose a bride, and her attendance, combined with a spell cast by Jacks, got her selected by Apollo. Evangeline spends the bulk of Once Upon a Broken Heart evading curses and working with Jacks, only to end the book believing that Jacks betrayed her.
During the events of Finale, Jacks and the other Fates were released from the deck of cards in which they’d been imprisoned, and Jacks worked alongside Princess Donatella to save the southern kingdom. As the Prince of Hearts Fate, Jacks’s kiss is supposed to be fatal to any girl but his one true love. During their time together, he and Donatella kissed, and while Donatella survived, she later fell in love with someone else. These events offer the motivations for Jacks’s actions in the Once Upon a Broken Heart series. He spends Once Upon a Broken Heart trying to convince Evangeline to open the arch because, once she decides to do so, she’ll need to retrieve the four arch stones, which Jacks intends to use to go back in time to his kiss with Donatella to have another chance at his happy ending.
Cultural Context: Fairy-Tale Influence
Garber’s novels are heavily steeped in the tradition of fairy tales. Rather than offering a retelling of a specific story, the Caraval and Once Upon a Broken Heart series borrow elements from various tales while incorporating the overall themes of happy endings, true love, spells and curses, and fate. Evangeline Fox is a Cinderella archetype: one who shows pure goodness even as others are terrible to her. In Once Upon a Broken Heart, this role was more literal in her conflicts with her wicked stepsister, Marisol, but Garber carries Evangeline’s tendencies to offer second chances and think the best of people into The Ballad of Never After. Throughout the novel, she seeks the least objectionable reasons for the actions of others, and she has a perpetual cheerfulness driven by her absolute certainty that she’ll find her own true love and happy ending. Even faced with harmful curses that twist and pervert love, Evangeline remains a beacon of kindness, believing that others won’t harm her even when they’ve proven that they will.
As a Fate, Jacks represents the magic present in fairy tales. In many tales, true love’s kiss has power, and Garber uses Jacks’s character arc to play with the true love’s kiss motif, reshaping it into something that he’s willing to do anything to find. Rather than a symbol of ultimate love, true love’s kiss becomes something that Jacks desperately seeks, even being willing to turn back time regardless of how doing so might harm others. Whereas Evangeline is an example of the goodness and beauty inherent in the often-rewritten tales with happy endings, Jacks symbolizes the original darker tales with their murky endings and desperate actions in the name of love or happiness.
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By Stephanie Garber
