Review: The Queen of Blood

The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It only happens every so often now that I’ll start a new book and find myself staying up until 4am to finish it. I did that with Queen of Blood last week. This book just ticked a lot of the right boxes for me.
Box 1: It has a really awesome brand of magic that involves partnering with magical, fantastic, elemental beings, and so it has the overall feel of a darker, older faery tale.
Box 2: Our heroine is also an unlikely choice who still manages to be very compelling. She doesn’t seem to exhibit any strong innate talent, but she’s stubborn enough not to give up and shows some innovative resourcefulness from time to time. And so when she does come into her own, you get to be extra excited with her!
Box 3: The stakes are high. Natural consequences exist. This makes it believable. The fate of the world as they know it seems to be on the line. The magical beings they’re partnering with are pulling off the kid gloves and $#!T gets real. People could die, and it sucks because life is not fair. Grandeur and power have a price and someone’s gotta pay it.
Box 4: Good writing!

And those are the boxes I can think of now. Overall, really liked it, would definitely recommend it, and have added the rest of the series to my reading list!

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Stephen Universe - Piano Cover!

Any other Stephen Universe fans out there? We really enjoyed watching the first 3 seasons of this show once it popped up on Hulu. If you've followed Nerd's Guide for a minute, you know that Adventure Time was a favorite several years back. We've been following Rebecca Sugar's creations ever since. 

So, we were watching Stephen Universe, and by about the third episode my fingers were positively itching to play through the end credit theme. One of the things that I personally really enjoy about Rebecca Sugar is how she incorporates music into her shows. Music that is spontaneous, simple, heartfelt and catchy. But by their nature, these songs are often better suited to ukulele or guitar accompanying vocals, so this was one of the first times I heard the potential for piano solo I would really enjoy playing. 

So here is a piano cover of "Love Like You" composed by Rebecca Sugar.
 

Video was recorded using the front camera on my iPad (I know, not the best, but I was being spontaneous!), audio is a Yamaha p85 digital piano recorded through GarageBand. 

You can click here for the sheet music to this particular arrangement I found on reddit. (personal use only, please).

Also, lmao at catbus looking like he's about do dive off the piano in the background. 

Review: Down Among the Sticks and Bones

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oh goodness, this was a beautiful book. I really enjoyed the first in the Wayward Children series "Every Heart a Doorway," but I may have loved this one more. Jack and Jill were such intriguing characters, so very tragic and dysfunctional that I really wanted to know their story. And here it is, this second book in the series predates the first, so we see Jack & Jill as their lives were before our original tale. And without spoiling too much, we get to see how they are shaped, from being born to a couple who definitely should never have been parents, to finding their door and in entering it, making commitments and decisions they had no chance of understanding, and then the consequences that must inevitably follow.

One of the things I love about Seanan McGuire's writing is her ability to take the monsters of legends, fairytales, and myths and make them real without making them less terrifying or watering them down. Our monsters are sometimes those closest to us, perhaps even those we've chosen to be near to. They are incorporated into the fabric of our everyday, but not any less fearsome for their familiarity.

This is a tale of coming of age and identity, of the things you can control and those you can't, of expectations and reality, and a true test of whether blood runs thicker than water.

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