Below is the complete list of Jenny Han’s Burn for Burn books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Burn for Burn Books
with Siobhan Vivian
About Burn for Burn
Burn for Burn is a young adult revenge trilogy co-written by Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian, set on the fictional Jar Island and centered on three girls whose private grievances bring them into a secret alliance. Kat DeBrassio, Lillia Cho, and Mary Zane begin with different reasons for wanting payback, but the pact they form gradually becomes more dangerous than any of them expects. Across Burn for Burn, Fire with Fire, and Ashes to Ashes, the series moves from contemporary high-school drama into darker psychological and supernatural territory without abandoning its focus on friendship, guilt, obsession, and the consequences of retaliation.
The opening novel draws its energy from the differences among the three protagonists. Kat is angry at former best friend Rennie, whose social cruelty has left her isolated. Lillia is wealthy, popular, and fiercely protective of her younger sister, but her position inside the island’s privileged social circle does not make her secure. Mary has returned to Jar Island carrying the trauma of earlier bullying connected to Reeve Tabatsky. Their targets overlap through the same school community, allowing each girl to act where another cannot without immediately attracting suspicion. What starts as a practical arrangement becomes the foundation of a complicated friendship.
Jar Island is essential to the trilogy’s atmosphere. Its beaches, ferries, tourist appeal, expensive homes, and long-established relationships create the appearance of an idyllic coastal community, yet the island is socially claustrophobic. People have known one another for years, reputations harden early, and old humiliations remain close at hand. The setting gives the revenge plots unusual pressure because escape is difficult: the girls continue seeing the same friends, enemies, families, and romantic interests while attempting to conceal what they have done.
The series becomes markedly more unstable in Fire with Fire. The consequences of the first book’s schemes cannot simply be contained or forgotten, and Mary’s emotional state begins revealing that the trilogy is not operating entirely within the boundaries of realistic contemporary fiction. Her anger carries implications that alter how earlier events are understood and push the story toward the supernatural. At the same time, Lillia’s relationship with Reeve becomes more complicated, placing personal feeling in direct conflict with the group’s original purpose.
That shift is one of the trilogy’s defining features. A reader beginning with the first novel might reasonably expect a high-school revenge drama built around secrets and escalating pranks. Instead, Han and Vivian progressively darken the premise until retaliation has consequences involving serious injury, death, and forces the characters cannot easily control. The change in genre is deliberate rather than decorative: Mary’s past and identity become central to the explanation of what is happening, while Kat and Lillia must confront how far their pact has carried them.
By Ashes to Ashes, the original promise of getting even has collapsed into a struggle with guilt, fear, grief, and the truth behind Mary’s history. Rennie’s death and the damage already inflicted on Reeve make it impossible for the girls to return to the moral simplicity of choosing targets and designing punishments. Their alliance, once strengthened by shared secrecy, is threatened by the same secrets that created it.
Although often associated primarily with Jenny Han because of her later prominence through The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Burn for Burn is fully a collaborative trilogy with Siobhan Vivian. Its identity is also sharply different from Han’s best-known solo romances: harsher, more suspenseful, and increasingly supernatural. The three books work as one escalating story in which revenge first creates solidarity, then tests loyalty, and finally forces the characters to face the difference between imagining punishment and living with what happens after it is carried out.