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A review by ambarbaq
Paint It All Red by S.T. Abby
4.0
A very well executed conclusion to this pentalogy! Satisfying endings are few and far in between, but I think Paint It All Red sticks the landing. It ties up all loose ends, maybe a little too neatly (although I will say I was speeding through the last couple of pages to finish it before people came over), but honestly that was not a problem to me.
Being that I finished reading Best Served Cold not long before I started this series, it is kinda hard not to compare both of these books (I am treating this entire series as one big book for this comparison). Not a negative comparison at all, but just how they both occupy spaces in the same spectrum of female rage revenge. Best Served Cold is neck deep in the grimdark genre, so its view on revenge is... well... grim! It is rarely satisfying and much less cathartic in the way the Mindfuck series is and that's fine! This series set out to be a female power fantasy, and I loved that about it. Lana can fight back and overpower any man she fights yet it never feels hamfisted or forced. S.T. Abby knows the type of book she wrote and all the trappings of the genre, she uses that to her advantage, giving us the reader a thrilling story about a woman quite literally burning down the town that broke her.
I will say that the way they sorta glossed over how Logan had sex with Lana at the end of the last book (bordering on non-consensual/punishment) left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The excuse he gave made sense in the book, but it felt out of place in a story like this.
I could write more about it, but I won't because my mind was thoroughly fucked. Hopefully I'll come back to this and add more discussion or irl with friends. Who knows!
Being that I finished reading Best Served Cold not long before I started this series, it is kinda hard not to compare both of these books (I am treating this entire series as one big book for this comparison). Not a negative comparison at all, but just how they both occupy spaces in the same spectrum of female rage revenge. Best Served Cold is neck deep in the grimdark genre, so its view on revenge is... well... grim! It is rarely satisfying and much less cathartic in the way the Mindfuck series is and that's fine! This series set out to be a female power fantasy, and I loved that about it. Lana can fight back and overpower any man she fights yet it never feels hamfisted or forced. S.T. Abby knows the type of book she wrote and all the trappings of the genre, she uses that to her advantage, giving us the reader a thrilling story about a woman quite literally burning down the town that broke her.
I will say that the way they sorta glossed over how Logan had sex with Lana at the end of the last book (bordering on non-consensual/punishment) left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The excuse he gave made sense in the book, but it felt out of place in a story like this.
I could write more about it, but I won't because my mind was thoroughly fucked. Hopefully I'll come back to this and add more discussion or irl with friends. Who knows!