There is a building in this book that disapproves of its owners kissing. When it has had enough, it rattles a cupboard full of pies until they stop, and it chimes the hall clock unnecessarily to make the point. The clock, for its part, measures the day in meals rather than hours, so that mead or Brambleberry Crisp simply appears when it decides one is overdue. The Hollow is the best invention in The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber, and a book that can make an inn this good company has already earned a certain amount of goodwill.
The Mirror of Infinite Endings Is a Gift Book
This is a novella, roughly forty-four thousand words, illustrated, with a new map, and the dedication is addressed to the readers who requested it. It returns to Evangeline Fox and Jacks after the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy has closed, and it picks up on the one loose thread that ending left dangling: she is mortal and he is not. Everything else in their lives is settled. They are running an inn.
Groups should know the cost of entry. The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber is closed to anyone who has not read the trilogy, and it drops a character from Caraval into its middle act without explanation. It will not work as a standalone, and there is no gentle on-ramp. If half the group has read Once Upon a Broken Heart and half has not, pick something else.
The Trick Inside the Mirror of Infinite Endings
Somebody nails a gold-edged invitation for a rival shop to the inn’s own reopening sign. Evangeline goes off to size up the competition, chases a thieving dragon into a room knee-deep in fog, and finds a mirror offering her one day inside a life whose story went differently. She steps through. Her memory of everything she owns goes with it, and she surfaces inside a version of herself with an hourglass on her wrist and the sand already dropping.
Why this is more than indulgence is simple. A romance that has already concluded cannot wring tension out of whether two people will end up together, so Stephanie Garber removes the one thing tying Evangeline to Jacks, which is her memory of why, and then watches what her instincts do unaided. The middle act of The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber is not really asking whether she can get home. It is asking whether she would arrive at the same answer twice, and the case it builds is assembled out of small involuntary reactions rather than declarations.
There is a fine comic layer over the top of it, too. Jacks spends the mirror sequence on the wrong side of the glass, watching an earlier and considerably worse version of himself put an arm around the woman he loves, and being unable to do a thing about it. Played completely straight, it is the funniest thing in the book.
Where It Goes Easy on Itself
The trouble is that nothing much is at stake. The fairy who sets all this in motion is mischievous rather than malign, the tests turn out to be passable, and the whole arrangement resolves in a ribboned glass box. The central obstacle of the entire premise, a human lifespan set against an immortal one, is eventually dealt with by eating something sweet. The whimsy is clearly on purpose, and it still drains the pressure out of the last quarter of The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber.
The rules are loose in a way that matters for a story about a bargain. One condition is explained only once it has already been satisfied, and the fairy’s constraints seem to bend whenever a scene requires it. And two of the twenty-three chapters retell the first seven from Jacks’s side, largely beat for beat, which in a full-length novel would be a nice change of angle but here eats a real portion of a short book. For the opening quarter, the only question in play is whether enough pies have been baked.
LaLa Takes the Last Chapter
Then the story finishes, the epilogue hands the narration to LaLa, and the prose sharpens. She has a word for the way she lives, missingness, the sensation of a hole whose contents you cannot recall, and everything in her fifteen pages is better observed than anything in the preceding two hundred: the deliberate sideways glance she gives a man she has classed as an enemy, the stacked bracelets that go quiet when she is sad, a vampire trying very hard and the flat recognition that trying is not enough. She is offered a choice with a genuinely dreadful price attached, and The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber ends on it.
It is superb, and it is also a trailer. A companion novella that closes by dangling the next book, with a beloved side character’s whole existence as collateral, is doing something canny to its reader as well as something generous.
For the Group
- Choosing versus remembering. The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber argues that a love you would arrive at again without any memory of choosing it is the real thing. Is that true, or is it the opposite of how attachment actually works?
- The bargain nobody consented to. Jacks makes an enormous, irreversible arrangement about Evangeline’s life without telling her. The novella treats this as a genuine failure and then forgives it inside a page. Should it have cost him more?
- Infinite endings, one marriage. Late on, the two of them disagree about whether other versions of themselves failing to find each other is unromantic or the reverse. Which side is your group on?
- What a novella owes you. Is ending on a cliffhanger with no resolution in sight a fair use of a short companion book?
- Content notes: kissing and a steady thrum of sensual tension, none of it explicit; mourning for parents who are dead and a brother who is too; a passing mention of an earlier poisoning; a vampire written as a lethal presence; a wedding party frozen where they stand.
Groups who want more of this register could go to The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love to finish the sequence properly, or to Alchemy of Secrets for the author working at full length on new ground. For a discussion that turns on second chances rather than alternate ones, When You Loved Me by Beatriz Williams gives a group considerably more to fight about.
What It Leaves Behind
The image that stays is not the mirror. It is a building that paints its own signs, hangs the bunting its owner never got round to, and puts her name on its clock while she is away being tested by a fairy. The Mirror of Infinite Endings by Stephanie Garber is at its best when it stops worrying about magic and simply describes a home that is glad someone came back to it.
As a book it is minor and knows it, too generous to its own characters to generate much heat, and unashamedly made for a particular group of people who wanted exactly this. What lingers instead is the idea it lands on almost in passing: that the ever after is not a destination you sprint toward but something closer to a kiss, which only works if you slow down for it. And then the lonely one walks toward a mirror, and the book has the nerve to stop.