Once Upon a Broken Heart in Order

The trilogy is complete. The instruction is: read the Caraval trilogy before you start, because Jacks — the Prince of Hearts, and the reason most people pick this series up — is introduced there, and his introduction is bound up with reveals Caraval is still protecting.

The reading order

1. Once Upon a Broken Heart (2021) — Evangeline strikes a deal with Jacks to prevent her stepsister's wedding. Fairy tales, curses and a bargain structure where every wish is granted precisely and horribly.
2. The Ballad of Never After (2022) — The Fates, a stolen memory and an arch that should not be opened. The middle book, and the one that most rewards having read Caraval.
3. A Curse for True Love (2023) — The resolution — and the most divisive ending in Garber's work, for reasons worth discovering rather than reading about.

A companion novella following Jacks and Evangeline, The Mirror of Infinite Endings, is scheduled for September 2026. It is not published yet.

Do you really need Caraval first?

You can follow the plot without it. What you lose is Jacks. He arrives in this series already carrying a history, a reputation and a set of rules the reader is assumed to understand, all of which were established across the Caraval books.

There is also a straightforward spoiler cost: Once Upon a Broken Heart refers freely to events and identities that Caraval treats as its central mysteries. Reading in the other direction removes them. Four extra books is a real ask, but this is one of the cases where the recommendation is not fandom pedantry.

If you genuinely will not read seven books, the compromise most readers land on is the Caraval trilogy only — three books, and it supplies everything this series assumes. The holiday novella can wait.

How it differs from Caraval

Tighter and more romance-forward. Caraval is a puzzle box with a love story inside it; this trilogy is a love story with a puzzle box inside it. The bargains are more central, the fairy-tale scaffolding is more explicit, and Evangeline is a far more open narrator than either Dragna sister.

It is also darker in a specific way — the running theme is memory and consent, and the third book pushes that further than most readers expect from the cover design.

The other difference is pace. Caraval unfolds over five nights and reads like a held breath; this trilogy covers months, moves between locations, and gives its characters room to make repeated mistakes. If Caraval's compressed timeline was what you liked, expect a looser book. If it was the bargains and the beautiful cruelty, expect more of both.

What to read next

If the bargain-and-curse machinery is what you liked, Kingdom of the Wicked runs on it too. If it was the fairy-tale menace, The Cruel Prince is the standard next step, and The Plated Prisoner is the darker one.