Fire With Fire by Jenny Han & Siobhan Vivian
Burn for Burn series #2
(2013) 517 pages

Final Rating: 7/10

Blurb:
When sweet revenge turns sour… Book two of a trilogy from New York Times bestselling author Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian.

Lillia, Kat, and Mary had the perfect plan. Work together in secret to take down the people who wronged them. But things didn’t exactly go the way they’d hoped at the Homecoming Dance.

Not even close.

For now, it looks like they got away with it. All they have to do is move on and pick up the pieces, forget there ever was a pact. But it’s not easy, not when Reeve is still a total jerk and Rennie’s meaner than she ever was before.

And then there’s sweet little Mary…she knows there’s something seriously wrong with her. If she can’t control her anger, she’s sure that someone will get hurt even worse than Reeve was. Mary understands now that it’s not just that Reeve bullied her—it’s that he made her love him.

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, burn for a burn. A broken heart for a broken heart. The girls are up to the task. They’ll make Reeve fall in love with Lillia and then they will crush him. It’s the only way he’ll learn.

It seems once a fire is lit, the only thing you can do is let it burn…

Review:
Mary just got worse in this book. In my review for “Burn for Burn”, I mentioned why Mary was an unlikeable character in my opinion, but in this book, she is nearly insufferable. Mary’s obsession with Reeve becomes horrifying. She begs Lillia to make Reeve fall in love with her so she can break his heart like how he broke hers but feels so much jealousy towards Lillia for managing to have hold of Reeve’s affections. Can I first say that Mary’s revenge idea against Reeve is the stupidest thing I ever heard? She asks Lillia to do it for her after having a mental breakdown, in which she does not think her words through. Lillia also felt like she had to do something to help Mary, since Kat and Lillia aren’t therapists and are high schoolers, the only way they know how to help Mary’s depression and suicidal thoughts is to get revenge on Reeve, so Lillia agrees to Mary’s stupid idea and spends so much time dedicated to Mary’s revenge alone. Mary also becomes such a jerk in this book, her emotions going haywire and causing her to lash out at the people who care for her the most.

Lillia took the brunt of all the drama and hurt in this book, while Kat was kind of just chilling and worrying about her own problems, and Mary was being a toxic mess of a friend. The fact that Kat and Mary state multiple times that the three of them are close friends and that they love each other, they never even think about Lillia’s feelings. They never notice her pain or try to help her as she sacrifices her time and her other friends for Mary and Kat, they only have their eyes set on revenge and themselves.

I really hated Kat’s relationship with Rennie in this book. I feel like Kat had been hurt by Rennie for far too long for her to suddenly forgive her because she said a few nice words to her on her doorstep. But Kat does forgive Rennie, and they end up having an okay 12-hour friendship until the book decides to ruin things over (I don’t want to spoil too much about the book, so I won’t write why their make-up was so short). 

But still, I rated this book so highly because I loved Lillia and Reeve together. This book’s authors managed to make a character I disliked in the first book the most adorable bean in the second without it seeming to be forced. I didn’t side with Reeve in the beginning, but towards the end of the book I saw his incredible character development and I caved. I wanted Lillia and Reeve to be happy together, but everything was pressed against them, especially Mary. Let’s just say Mary is the one who least expected Lillia and Reeve to be a real thing and considers this to be a betrayal from Lillia. 

 The ending was jaw-dropping, and I could write a whole paragraph full of spoilers on it if I didn’t want this review to have any more than a few minor (or just anything but major) spoilers. This book was fun as hell. Painful, tortuous, and agonizing. But fun nevertheless.