Review: The Ballad of Never After

The Ballad of Never After by Stephanie Garber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was under the impression at first that Stephanie Garber was going to write her debut series Caraval as a duology, and then it turned into a trilogy. So it goes again with the second series of Garber’s fantasy realm, which I was expecting to be a duology conclusion last year, but it’s pretty clear with the ending of this book (a particularly mind bending cliffhanger) that we’re getting another trilogy. I think at some point about halfway through, that became clear - as briskly paced and imaginatively detailed as Garber has made it, I was starting to sense that the book wasn’t going to end this particular story, which made me a bit afraid that Garber was going to do another series with steadily diminishing returns the way her first trilogy did. But what advantages this book has, though - namely, much more interesting characters and lore than the first trilogy, and dear sweet Fates above, that ending. It’s still got me scratching my head, and I don’t see that stopping for quite a while. Maybe not until the third book drops…

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