Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber

 

DNF @ p.108

I loved CARAVAL and liked LEGENDARY, so even though I ended up not liking FINALE, I was still excited about the spinoff series about Jacks, Once Upon a Broken Heart. The beginning starts off super promising, with Evangeline making a deal with a Fate to stop her stepsister from marrying the man she thinks she's in love with-- only for it to turn into a Curse of the Monkey's Paw sort of situation where sometimes the resolution is worse than the curse.

Here's the thing about Stephanie Garber: her books feel like the stories we all wrote in our bedrooms when we were sixteen. There will be people with names like Morning Glory and Neptunia, and kisses will taste like vanilla ice cream and all the men will smell like candles. I say this without any malice in my heart because I do think there is a certain charm to this style of writing-- one of my guilty pleasure reads is ENCHANTED PARADISE by Johanna Hailey, which is basically a Sarah J. Maas book if it were written in the 1980s. It worked for me in CARAVAL because I think there was a better danger to whimsy ratio, but here, everything just felt a little too fluffy and frothy for me to take seriously. I got really bored and kept putting it down. I don't think I'll pick it up again.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars