The book Garber was under contract to write was a dark fantasy she had pitched and sold. Once she sat down to actually write it, the material drained her, and she woke up one morning with a completely different story demanding her attention. What she confessed to her editor that day became the book readers now hold.

Stephanie Garber

I was feeling heartsick when I started this book, so I wanted to write a story about heartbreak, and the desperate lengths that people will go to because of broken hearts, and because of love.

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publishersweekly.com, “Four Questions for Stephanie Garber”

Long before Jacks was attached to it, the Evangeline half of the story existed as a separate, unnamed concept. Garber had been turning it over for some time, unable to figure out who the dangerous co-lead should be, until the two ideas finally clicked into place.

Stephanie Garber

I had this idea for what I called Murdery Cinderella. I thought it would be so fun to write a book where a Cinderella-type girl marries a prince who is murdered on the wedding night. She then becomes the prime suspect and to solve the crime and clear her name, she’s forced to team up with a very handsome someone who she fears might be the actual murderer.

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thenewsette.com, “Stephanie Garber - Author”

Jacks had appeared in ‘Legendary,’ the second Caraval book, as a secondary figure. By the time the Caraval trilogy ended, reader opinion on him was mixed at best. Building a new series around a character readers had not warmed to was a gamble, and Garber knew it.

Stephanie Garber

Writing this series around Jacks felt like a bit of a risk and I was a little nervous to do it. But I also believe in following the stories that make me nervous. If I’m writing something that feels too safe or too easy, I feel like that will show up to readers — and I don’t want readers to feel safe when they read my books. When someone is reading one of my books, I want them to feel as if they are falling in love with someone who they aren’t entirely sure will love them back.

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thenewsette.com, “Stephanie Garber - Author”

She drew an explicit line between this book and the one that launched her career. The comparison she reached for was not about plot or world, but about the specific feeling that drives her to finish a manuscript at all.

Stephanie Garber

Caraval was a book that really came from my heart. I wrote the story because I loved it so much I felt as if I had to write it — and I believed that other people would love it just because I loved it, which is exactly how I felt writing Once Upon A Broken Heart.

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thenerddaily.com, “Q&A: Stephanie Garber, Author of ‘Once Upon A Broken Heart’”

Two audiences would pick up this book simultaneously: Caraval readers who already carried opinions about Jacks, and newcomers with no prior attachment. Both groups needed to believe in him from page one, which required the book to do contradictory work at once.

Stephanie Garber

It was a bit of a tricky thing to balance, because I knew some readers would enter into this book already knowing one of my main characters — Jacks — while other’s would be meeting him for the very first time, and I really wanted to write a book that would appeal to both.

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thenerddaily.com, “Q&A: Stephanie Garber, Author of ‘Once Upon A Broken Heart’”

In the book’s mythology, Jacks, the Fates’ Prince of Hearts, kills anyone he kisses who is not his true love. The constraint is not decorative: it eliminates the most conventional way to build romantic tension between two leads. Working around it forced Garber to engineer substitute moments of closeness, including a scene involving magical tears that require Jacks to hold Evangeline near.

Stephanie Garber

I wanted to write a series where you could read each book on its own and get a complete story, but then when you read all the books together, they feel like one complete story, too. I spent a lot of time figuring out the whole arc before finishing this first book.

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publishersweekly.com, “Four Questions for Stephanie Garber”

With Caraval she had written into each sequel without a mapped plan, and felt the cost of that approach. Here she drafted roughly half of the second book before the first went into editing, treating the full trilogy shape as a problem to solve before publication rather than after.

The first draft was finished just before Covid-19 hit. Revision happened under lockdown, during which her mother was diagnosed with cancer and Garber herself received a false diagnosis for an incurable disease. The pressure of that period eventually forced a hard creative choice: total disconnection from news and media, which she described as the only condition under which she could write at all. What she lived through also pushed her to sharpen Evangeline’s defining quality.

Stephanie Garber

Even though it’s a story about heartbreak, I wanted to write a character who believes in fairy tales and true love and love at first sight and all of these things.

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publishersweekly.com, “Four Questions for Stephanie Garber”

The world of ‘Once Upon a Broken Heart’ shares geography with Caraval but was designed on a completely different register. Where Caraval, the magical competition at the center of her first trilogy, announced its strangeness loudly, Garber wanted this setting to feel inhabited rather than performed.

Stephanie Garber

not in big bold strokes like Caraval [paraphrased from audio]

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Forbidden Planet TV, “Stephanie Garber takes us behind the scenes of Once Upon a Broken Heart!”

The specific image she returned to was tiny dragons occupying the docks where squirrels might otherwise sit, magic woven into ordinary texture rather than staged for spectacle.

Garber started the book at a low personal point, and the two leads she built reflect a self divided between how she presents to the world and what she quietly carries. She named exactly which character holds which part.

Stephanie Garber

Evangeline has a lot of my positivity and my optimism. I’m hopefully not like Jacks, but I will admit that I do relate to his character. I tend to hold onto things from the past, especially heartbreak, which is something that I have in common with the Prince of Hearts.

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acourtofcoffeeandbooks.wordpress.com, “*Blog Tour + Interview* Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber”

The romantic tension in the book was engineered around a specific contradiction, and Garber named the effect she was after precisely. She wanted readers to hold two incompatible feelings at once for the entirety of the story.

Stephanie Garber

I actually wrote Once Upon A Broken Heart with the hope that readers would feel as if Evangeline should run far away from Jacks, but at the same time really want them to kiss each other.

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acourtofcoffeeandbooks.wordpress.com, “*Blog Tour + Interview* Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber”

Part of what makes Jacks work as a romantic lead is that he never performs goodness or softens his intentions. At a signing event, Garber explained the quality she finds most compelling in him, and why she thinks it travels to readers.

Stephanie Garber

He’s really honest about who he is. He really tells you exactly what he’s thinking, exactly what he’s planning to do. And he doesn’t ever try to pretend to be anything different. And I think that’s why he’s so appealing. [paraphrased from audio]

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Leyla Demirel, “I Met Stephanie Garber! (Author of Caraval & Once Upon A Broken Heart)”

That honesty is also what makes him unsafe. Garber’s aim was a reading experience that never lets the audience feel settled, because a story that feels too easy, in her view, is one that has already failed.