Burn for Burn

About the Burn for Burn series

Three girls on Jar Island who each have a private, escalating grievance against someone who's wronged them -- a former best friend who betrayed her, a golden-boy jock hiding real cruelty, a teacher who let abuse slide -- fall in together almost by accident and start plotting a shared campaign of revenge, pranks that are meant to sting rather than really harm. Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian split the narration between all three girls, Lillia, Kat and Mary, in alternating first person, which lets the book work as a slow-build ensemble mystery as much as a revenge story: each girl is hiding pieces of her own history from the other two, and from the reader, for most of the first book.

What starts as YA contemporary drama shifts across the trilogy into something with a genuine supernatural edge, as Mary's own backstory turns out to be considerably darker and stranger than the other girls -- or most readers -- expect going in, and the revenge plots stop being containable through mundane means alone. It's a tonally different collaboration for Han than her solo work, co-written entirely with YA author Siobhan Vivian, and it trades her usual coming-of-age warmth for something closer to a thriller with a slow-burn twist embedded in its structure from the start.

How to read this series

Read the trilogy in publication order -- Burn for Burn (2012), Fire with Fire (2013), Ashes to Ashes (2014) -- which is also story chronology; the alternating three-narrator structure and Mary's slowly-revealed backstory both depend on reading the books in sequence, since early hints only make sense once later reveals land. There are no companion books or spin-offs; the story is told completely within the three novels.