How Does 'Burn Book' End?

Burn Book ends very similarly to how it begins, with the high-energy action flying fast and furiously until a satisfying and somewhat confusing end. At its core, Burn Book is a revenge story told by a very sharp and incredibly social high school outsider who is pretty fed up with everyone at her school. In the book’s final pages of action, our outsider turns the tables on the mean high school at the very high school’s pep rally. The main scenes in the last act revolve around this woman exposing and putting on public display all of the secret scandals in her famous “burn book” that she had secretly compiled throughout the story, revealing corruption by a few teachers and other high school employees, as well as revealing various cheating schemes, leaked messages, etc. This final act of exposures causes much chaos, with several very dramatic falls from high social status (both squeaky-clean and not-so squeaky-clean) in the book’s conclusion, at which point our outsider heroine –having revealed all secrets— walks away to hopefully quieter times, having publicly taken down the powerful mean high school social cliques and their secret corruption at their very own popular event.

What I found most compelling about this story’s resolution was its defiance of reader expectations. The narrator watches as the bullies from the clique receive their ‘comeuppance’, but also loses a number of supporters who, despite their own numerous sins, were part of the status-quo. The closing scenes of the book are bittersweet. The physical Burn Book is destroyed by fire in a symbolic ritual of purging, and the protagonist reflects on the ways in which toxicity breeds further toxicity. The last line of the story is of the protagonist setting off for a new school, a blank notebook under her arm. We are left to wonder whether she will repeat the cycles of behavior that she so despised at her previous school.

Also worth noting is how this story handles accountability for bad behavior. The bullies aren’t one-dimensional evil, they’re just as trapped in the high school hierarchy as the protagonist is. Their behavior isn’t excused by the story, but it is confronted, and the ending leaves us wondering if exposing and publicly humiliating the bad kids is enough to create real change. The real growth for the protagonist is in realizing that the burn book gave her power to enact revenge, but it also kept her stuck in the same dubious worldview as the people she loathes. The book’s greatest strength is that it never provides easy outs or comforting lies to real-life problems. Often, justice isn’t clean, and healing isn’t linear. This story reminds us of that uncomfortable reality long after the cover is closed, much like the smell of smoke lingers after a fire.