An innkeeper stands in a tavern with six dozen pies cooling on every surface and a manual open in front of her that insists you can never have too many. She is one day out from a grand reopening. Her partner, who is immortal and fond of telling her that dragons are not pets, is pretending not to like the dragons. The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber opens on a domestic scene so contented it should be the last page of a book rather than the first, which turns out to be exactly the point: this is a novella about what you do after the happily ever after arrives and you discover it came without instructions.
What The Mirror of Infinite Endings Is and Who It Is For
This is a companion to the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, written because readers asked for it, and the dedication says so outright. Flatiron’s cataloguing numbers it as the fourth book in the series, though it functions as the coda most readers will file as 3.5. It runs about forty-four thousand words, comes illustrated by Lotusbubble with a fresh map by Virginia Allyn, and assumes you have read Once Upon a Broken Heart, The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love. It also assumes you will recognise a name or two from Caraval. Come in cold and you will be reading someone else’s inside jokes.
Evangeline Fox and Jacks now live at the Hollow, an inn for travellers and adventurers that Jacks grew up in, and which is the finest thing The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber has to offer. It has moods. It rattles its cupboards when it disapproves of kissing, lights its own candles with rather too much fanfare, and keeps a hall clock that chimes meals instead of hours, conjuring Mystery Stew or Brambleberry Crisp into existence whenever it feels one is due. The Hollow occasionally finishes your chores while you are out, and then huffs at you for not noticing.
The Structure of The Mirror of Infinite Endings
The plot proper turns on two things Evangeline does not know. Jacks has been quietly trying to solve the one problem their ending left open, which is that she will age and he will not, and the solution he pursues carries a price he does not disclose. Meanwhile a gold-bordered card advertising a rival establishment, the Emporium of Else, turns up nailed to her own reopening sign, and because she is Evangeline Fox, she goes to look.
Inside is the mirror of the title, which offers a day in a life whose story ended differently. She steps through, loses her memory of everything she has, and wakes up somewhere she recognises with an hourglass tattooed on her wrist and sand already falling.
What Garber has done here is smarter than a nostalgia exercise, and it is the reason The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber works at all. A completed romance cannot generate tension from whether the couple gets together, because they already did. So she wipes the slate and makes Evangeline do it again from nothing, with no memory of the reasons she chose him, and on a clock. The question the middle third actually asks is not will she get back but would she still pick this, and the answer arrives through her own instincts rather than her recollections. It is a genuinely good structural idea for a book like this, and it is executed with real charm, including a long sequence in which Jacks is furiously jealous of an earlier version of himself and has to watch that version put an arm around his own beloved.
Where Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber Coasts
- Almost nothing is at risk. The fae who sets the plot moving is capricious but not malicious, the tests are survivable, and the resolution arrives as a gift in a ribboned glass box. The book never once feels as though it might hurt anyone.
- The rules keep arriving late. The first test is explained to the reader only after it has already been passed, and the terms of the bargain shift to suit the scene. For a story about a magical contract, the small print is vague.
- A third of it is retold. Two chapters revisit the opening seven from Jacks’s perspective, largely beat for beat. In a long novel that would be a flourish. At this length it is a meaningful share of the page count.
- The first quarter’s only source of tension is pie. Whether Evangeline has baked enough of it, and whether the guide is right that you cannot have too many.
- The central problem is solved by eating a biscuit. A mortal woman and an immortal Fate is the real question the trilogy left behind, and the answer The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber reaches for is confectionery. The whimsy is deliberate. It still lets the air out.
The Epilogue Belongs to LaLa
The strongest fifteen pages arrive after the story is over and are narrated by somebody else. LaLa has a word for her own condition, missingness, the state of carrying a hole without any memory of what was taken out of it, and the epilogue puts her in front of the fae’s tent with a decision far crueller than anything Evangeline faced. Garber writes her with a precision the main narrative of The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber does not attempt: the calculated glance at a man she has classed as an opponent, the golden bracelets that stop making music when she is unhappy, the recognition that a wolf can try very hard to be a rabbit and still not live on flowers.
It is also, frankly, an advertisement. The epilogue ends on a cliff with LaLa’s entire life as the stake and no book to resolve it in, which is a commercially astute thing for a novella to do and a slightly cheap one.
Content Notes
The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber is the gentlest book in this series. Kissing and a good deal of sensual tension, none of it explicit; bereavement of both parents and of a sibling; a brief reference to an earlier poisoning; a vampire whose nearness is written as a lethal threat; a character who freezes a whole wedding party where they stand; and a magical bargain struck on someone’s behalf without asking her, which the book treats as a real breach of trust rather than as romance.
Read These Next
- Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber. Not a read-alike, a prerequisite. The mirror sequence is in conversation with its opening chapters throughout.
- A Curse for True Love by Stephanie Garber. The novella picks up directly after it and assumes you remember how it closed.
- The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry. Two versions of one life and a romance that depends on which you are standing in, with far more ache in it.
- Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee. Lighter and warmer on the same premise: another self, another ending, one door between them.
Readers who want Garber at full length rather than in miniature should go to Alchemy of Secrets, her newest, or back to Caraval where all of this started.
The Verdict
Judged as a novel, The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber is slight, repetitive in its middle, and resolved too kindly. Judged as what it actually is, a gift to the people who asked for it, packaged with illustrations and a map and a clock that serves pie, it is close to ideal. It gives Jacks and Evangeline a day apart so that they can choose each other again from scratch, and it has the sense to finish on the idea that a happily ever after is not a thing you chase down but a thing you lean into, like a kiss.
Then it hands the last chapter to the lonely one, opens a door she should not walk through, and leaves you standing in front of it. Which means the most interesting thing in the book is the part Garber has not written yet, somewhere on the other side of LaLa’s mirror.
