review: fire by sara b. elfgren & mats strandberg

After finding out they were the Chosen Ones in The Circle, the five surviving girls are still at work to stop the apocalypse in Fire. As the school year starts, they discover their principal (who they learned was part of the Council in The Circle) has been ousted and the new principal will be implementing the new Positive Engelsfors movement into the curriculum. The Chosen Ones think the movement is stupid, but their classmates and a number of the adults in the community embrace it which isolates the girls further. As it turns out, the Chosen Ones have good reason to be wary of Positive Engelsfors.

As with the first book in the Engelsfors trilogy, Fire starts with a lot of unnecessary information. Fire would’ve been amazing if it started at Part Three as that’s where the action really picks up. Instead there’s a lot of background about the Positive Engelsfors movement (which does play a huge role in the plot, but much of the setup could’ve been eliminated) and what’s been going on in the lives of the Chosen Ones. Another issue was how many characters are in this lengthy novel. The Circle suffered from the number of characters in it and Fire introduces even more. Making matters all the more confusing, the girls switch bodies at one point. Yet Fire is better than The Circle. The latter third of Fire really shows just how high the stakes are for the Chosen Ones and the entire town of Engelsfors.
4/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Overlook.