🍎 The Ballad of Never After — Review 🦊

Author: Stephanie Garber

Rating: ✨5/5✨

Sexual tension: 📈📈📈

Character development: 📈📈📈

Tropes: who hurt you?, bandaging wounds, jealousy, enemies to lovers, morally grey MMC

~ Spoilers below this point ~

Seriously, I have quotes that spoil the book. Come back after you read it or stay if you're a masochist and into that kind of thing. No judgment either way.

What. An. Ending. If you didn't read this yet, stop what you're doing and pick it up. Most series have a wonderful first book and then a terrible second book. Not with The Ballad of Never After. This was my most anticipated read of the year and it was by far the best of the year. I was hooked from the very first page. I literally couldn't put it down.

🦊 Evangeline... She's lost her naïveté and it suits her. I honestly love that she's more on guard and reminds herself that not everyone is good. But I also love how she still has hope. She's cautiously optimistic instead of blindly optimistic. Evangeline becomes darker in this book. Especially because she commits her first murder (in self-defense). I like her edge, even if I want to choke her myself sometimes.

🍎 Jacks... My sad, wicked boy. He actually breaks my heart. I LOVE that we find out more about his past. I love that we find out who he was before he was a Fate. I love Jacks and how developed he becomes. I love we see the Jacks that is buried under the Fate. Jacks is such a complex antihero and I'm here for it.

💔 The romance…the tension *chefs kiss*. I have passed away from how perfect it was. I want Jacks and Evangeline to be together in the worst way…so why do they keep fighting their feelings and why do jerks like Apollo keep ruining it for me. Ugh. 😤

Okay...now the ending. My heart is actually broken. I see other people saying it and they aren't being dramatic. Like Apollo came out of left field...is he Vengeance? Me thinks so. 🧐

And what happened to Jacks? Stephanie...please tell us. I will literally die if he’s gone. 🥹

This is supposed to be a duology, but there is NO WAY there isn't a third book on the way. And I KNOW I will be reading it. And now I wait for next year…😐😭

Anyway, I'll be impatiently waiting for the news of book 3 to drop. Next up, Defend the Dawn by Brigid Kemmer!