Despite knee surgery (Kendell) and mysterious knee pain (mine) and whooping cough (mine) and marathon training (also mine), Kendell and I have done quite a bit of hiking this spring, summer, and fall. Almost every weekend, we’ve hiked some trail or other, sometimes with Nathan or Jake along. (When my knees were really problematic, Kendell took the boys without me, which was a little bit traumatic for me, especially because without me there they didn’t take many photos!) We’ve repeated several trails more than once, especially after my knee injury, because I was limited to not-very-steep trails, and we live in Utah, where steep trails are the norm.

But this morning, when we decided that it would probably be dry enough to hike, and that we could survive hiking in 30 temps, I couldn’t stand the thought of doing a trail we’d already done two or three times before. Even if it meant some elevation gain, I needed to go somewhere new.

And how cool is it that there are still trails close to us that we haven’t hiked yet?

I took him to Grove Creek, a trail about 10 miles north of where we live, on the west face of Timpanogos. He’d never been on it. I had checked it out earlier this week, when I wanted to just sit by the side of a river somewhere, to listen to running water in the trees and be alone for awhile. That day, I drove to the trailhead and walked up for about ten minutes, found a log by the river (well, really: it’s actually a creek) and sat. But I wasn’t alone for long; a man and his daughter came up the trail just about 15 minutes behind me. He walked right over to where I was sitting and asked me if I’d seen the dead deer. As I hadn’t, he told me his story: earlier that day, he’d been running up the trail, came around a curve, and saw a mountain lion pulling a deer off the trail.

As “seeing a mountain lion in the wild” is high on my list of things I hope to witness while hiking, I was intrigued by this story. He showed me where the cougar had pulled the deer into the weeds. It had eaten the muscle of one of the legs, and what looked like most of the internal organs.

After the guy and his daughter left, I went back to the log by the river and waited, hoping the mountain lion would come back, but it never did. (PS: Yes, I know that is crazy. I just…I want the world to be like it should be. The mountains should have mountain lions eating deer in them.)

That’s when I really decided what our weekend hike would be.

The Grove Creek trail starts at a trailhead in the foothills above Pleasant Grove and heads east into Grove Creek Canyon. It is immediately steep, a dirt road that follows the creek fairly closely. Not very far up this road—no more than 10 minutes—there is a trail on the left. (The road ends shortly after this, at what I assume is a mine shaft; there is a metal door in the mountain, but if you speak friend it doesn’t open.) The steepness continues! Eventually it levels out just a little bit, and then it takes a sharp turn west. This made me a little bit anxious, as I thought I’d missed a turn. Most trails along the Wasatch Front go, in some rambling way, right up the canyon, but this was just my first hint at how different this trail is.

There are two very long switchbacks. You go west for about a half mile, and then south, climbing all the while. This is the steepest trail I’ve done in a little while, so I was huffing pretty hard. Most of the trees have lost all of their leaves, but there were some evergreen bushes here and there, and some vibrant purple plants so there was still some color. You’re still just in a landscape that feels like Utah to me: scrub brush and dryness, with the cliffs on the opposite side of the canyon coming in and out of view as the trail winds and dips.

Eventually, the trail gets to another sharp turn. It turns east—and then you realize just how much you’ve climbed. You find yourself high up on the side of the mountain, on a trail that juts up and down, right along the edge of the cliff. It goes over talus slopes of clattering slate and next to towering basalt cliffs lined with white intrusions. Far down below is the creek in the bottom of the canyon; to your right are steep drops. Kendell, who has some fear of heights, was nervous on the spot. I get a little bit nervous sometimes on trails that cut across steep angles, but for some reason (perhaps just my hiking poles) I wasn’t afraid at all.

We followed the trail up to a bench that’s perched near the top of a waterfall, marking the spot where all of that climbing pays off. You turn around to sit and the canyon is below you, forming a ragged, inverse triangle that frames a view of the valley. It was hazy when we were up there (my cell phone gave me that “you should clean your lens” message, but it was because of the haze), but on a clear day it would be an even more beautiful view.

The trail keeps going past the bench. It eventually hooks up to the Great Western Trail and Timpanookee Road. You can also loop somewhere and follow the trail down to Battlecreek Canyon. We were running out of time, so we went for about 20 more minutes past the bench.

I think it’s fairly established that I love hiking. I’ve never really hiked a trail I couldn’t find something beautiful on. But this trail—it was beautiful but also just really fun. That long walk along the side of the canyon was invigorating! After the bench, there’s a bridge across the creek, and then the landscape totally changes. You’re now hiking at the base of tall trees, on a trail that’s soft dirt, pine needles, a shifting carpet of browned aspen leaves. We climbed over a huge fallen tree, which looked like it had come down just yesterday; the broken trunk was still bright and you could smell that woody smell. In a deep, shaded section, the trail meets up with the creek again, as it comes down a pine-lined ravine, and at that part it was frozen solid. Someone else had put some pine boughs across the ice, so we crossed it carefully and kept going. The trial crossed the creek a couple of other times. Finally, we got to a marshy meadow that must be beautiful in the summer. We were out of time and had to turn around, even though we didn’t make it all the way to the meadow at the top.

I loved this trail. It was constantly changing and surprising me. I feel pretty lucky to live so close to so many trails and plan on going back to this one next summer, to see it in green and wildflower colors.

One day when I was in my no-running purgatory, I clicked on the Instagram story of a runner I follow. She’d made a short selfie video of herself running down a street in Brooklyn. I watched for about 15 seconds and then I burst into tears.

Until I couldn’t breathe like that I didn’t know that part of what I love about running is breathing like that. The way your breath moves into a pattern that weaves into and around the pattern of sound your feet make on the cement. The way you can talk if you have to, but your words are punctuated in all the wrong places by breathlessness.

So yesterday morning while I was running, I didn’t just nod and smile to the people I passed. I didn’t just say “morning” to the two crossing guards I saw, the teenager nefariously slinking out of a back door of the high school, and the mom walking her two kids to school. I said, instead, “hi!” (“Hi” is incredibly difficult to say when you’re exercising, because it takes breath to get that H out).

I said “I hope you have a great morning.”

And maybe I sounded like an idiot, but I don’t care. Because I was out there in the cold November morning, before the sun came over the mountains and then after, when it bubbled over a low canyon and I had to put my sunglasses on.

I was cold and my fingers were freezing, but I was breathing like that—breathing like a runner. Because I was running.

Walking more than running, still, but still: running.

Through the very last of the fallen leaves, which are now slippery instead of crunchy. Past crossing guards, through a fortunate green light on a busy road, along the grass still crisped with frost. Right into the sunlight.

I missed it.

I missed it, and not just because it helps me maintain my emotional balance and my tenuous grasp on a barely-acceptable weight. I missed it for what I love, and for learning what I love about running but hadn’t really put into words.

Like, I love running when I’m some odd, unbalanced fraction into the run that is more than halfway. Like 5.5 miles into 8 miles, .6875 the way finished, and I realize: I’m tired but I’m OK, I’m strong enough to finish. I’m strong enough to finish strong.

I love the feeling of compression on my thighs, the smoothness of a running tank when my hands brush across it.

I love adjusting my socks just so, putting my running shoes on after slipping in my orthotics, and double knotting them.

I love the way I’ve grown to instinctually know when I’ve gone a mile, even without looking at my watch.

I love spotting another runner running toward me, getting closer, nodding to each other when we pass.

I love the way that miles add up in my Strava record, and how no matter what number you start with, maybe a twelve-minute mile run three times a week, you can always get faster, you can always add more miles and more repetitions.

I love getting to a point where I am exhausted, and I don't think I can run one more step, but there's still a mile left, and despite the exhaustion I keep running and finish the last mile.

I don’t know how long this will last. Already it feels like the blessed magic of the cortisone shots is starting to wear off. I keep remembering the despair I felt, when the first orthopedic doctor told me to stop running. My husband said “maybe you’ll get over it, maybe if you stop running you’ll find other things” and I told him what I knew: no I won’t. My two months of not-running taught me that I need to run. And the joy that I feel now that I am running again confirms it.

I won’t get over it.

I won’t get my endorphins somewhere else, like that doctor told me to.

It is this: running. This is what I love. My breath in my lungs, my body moving this way. And I will do whatever I can to keep running, so I can hear my breath and feel that joy.

It is still my favorite way to move, and I suspect it always will be.

Remember back when the Twilight novels were popular, and everyone was talking about vampires? If you talked to me back then about those books, I’d likely give you an earful about all the things I disliked about them. Bella’s easy rejection of her mother, for example, and the way that Meyer broke the rules of her own universe (which, sure, you’re a writer so you get to make the rules, and decide when to break them, but Edward’s century-old undying semen was just too much), and the creepy-possessive tone of Bella and Edward’s relationship.

But one of the things that made me the most annoyed is the one that seems super-obvious to me. Not just about the Twilight series, but all vampire novels. Edward might look like a teenage boy, but his mind is old. He is a 100-year-old man dating a 16-year-old girl.

That’s called pedophilia, folks.

(And yet all the Mormon moms loved the books.)

I wanted to read something spooky and atmospheric in October, and I decided that Octavia Butler would be a good choice. Kindred was checked out, so I went with Fledgling, which is a novel that reimagines the vampire story in some unusual ways, looking at it through a lens of racism. I was leery—is there really a vampire novel I can enjoy without picking it to pieces?—but Butler is such a good writer I decided to go with it.

And really: I shouldn’t have worried. Octavia Butler is not Stephenie Meyer (the opposite is also true). She almost immediately addresses that objection I have to vampire novels in general: A body might look a certain age, but the mind can be far older, so where does normality end and creepiness begin? She addresses it by shoving us readers into an uncomfortable experience almost immediately: the main character, who looks like a 10- or 11-year-old child, has sex with a 20-something man. She wants to; this isn’t a rape (and it isn’t explicitly described, either), but the man she is having sex with—who becomes her first symbiont—is also uncomfortable.

Which tells you immediately that this isn’t like other vampire novels.

I'm leaving the summary fairly vague because I enjoyed watching the plot unfold so much, but the basic idea is this: A person who awakes starving and injured in a cave gradually comes to realize that she is a vampire. Her injuries have cost her her memory, though, so as she learns about what that means, we do as well. Butler creates an alternate society out of the vampire legends. They aren’t really blood-sucking murders, but creatures who developed alongside humans. Who actually need humans to survive. Yes, they bite and feed, but not to kill. Instead it is a symbiotic relationship; the humans feed the Ina (the vampires’ name for themselves) while chemicals in the Inas’ saliva help the humans live longer, healthier lives.

It was still creepy though. I feel like part of the novel's purpose was to force you to look at things that make you feel uncomfortable, so as to better understand how it feels to be "other." For me, reading the story as an LDS person who struggles with our polygamous heritage, the discomfort it made me look at is this question: can we love (romantically) more than one person? How does that even work? (It didn't bring me any closer to understanding it with any real-world application.) The way the Ina live, with several different symbionts who they love in different ways, made me think about my great grandmother who was a second wife, and wonder again how she coped. I wish she (and all of them, second and third and fifth wives, even first wives) could have whatever is in the Ina saliva that made it easier for the symbionts to live together in such a relationship. In fact, while I would imagine many Mormons would not see this as one of the “best books” we could be reading, it actually gave me a little bit of insight into how that kind of relationship might work.

(Not enough for my polygamous heritage to not feel like a horror story.)

Fledgling was Octavia Butler’s last book, and I am not sure, but to me it felt like there could’ve been a sequel. The world was so fully created and peopled, and Shori (the main character, who looks like a child but is not, in fact, a child) so compelling—she would say, I believe, interesting—that I definitely wanted more.

I wish there could be.

I've written this before, but I should probably repeat it:

The reason I love Laini Taylor is that she does fantasy that isn't the same-old fantasy. So much of fantasy is evocative of something else, and I just don't have the reading time or patience to re-read the same story told in a slightly different way. Laini Taylor's fantasy is unique; it's not retold Tolkien or George R. R. Martin, it's not even fairy-tale or myth reworkings. It's different from anything else. 

That holds true for the sequel to Strange the Dreamer.

At least...mostly true.

I can't believe I'm writing this, because I love Laini Taylor, but I had mixed feelings about The Muse of Nightmares.

On the I-loved-this-book-so-much side, I enjoyed the story. It starts right where Strange the Dreamer left off, except it also adds two new characters, Kora and Nova, who are sisters living on an island in an Arctic setting. These sisters added greatly to the tale, even though at first you're not exactly sure how they fit in to the story of Strange and Sarai. (Plus I just really love stories about sisters, and Kora and Nova add a layer of story that makes the whole novel so much richer.) There is the same excellent writing style, and as the story works through its crises, your heart pounds and you just want to know who will be safe. And Mina, a character I didn’t pay much attention to in the first book, became one of my favorite novel characters I’ve ever read.

Plus there's another library, this one that needs to be excavated before its contents fall into the river flowing under Weep.

As I write this, I find it hard to explain the tug on the other side, the I-loved-this-book-except feeling. This is because I really did enjoy so much about the book. I think what I didn't love is the way the romance between Sarai and Lazlo develops; it was so beautiful and heartfelt and meaningful that it started to bug me a little bit. I wanted there to be some resistance, for them to argue about something or to have some non-resolvable personal issue that they had to work around...but there wasn't any. It was just soft and sweet, just new, young love, with all of the conflict coming from external sources.

Probably this is a problem only for me, and it's why I tend to avoid romance novels in the first place. I'm not sure if it annoys me because I never had a relationship like that and I wish I had, or if I know they actually only exist in romance novels rather than real life. 

Plus I wanted to spend more time in Weep.

Still, though. My expectations are high because this is Laini Taylor. In fact, as I think about it, what I am realizing that what bothered me is that it is evocative of other fantasy: Laini Taylor's. It made me remember the end of Dreams of Gods and Monsters​, where Karou and Akiva are sort-of together but it's left with an unfulfilled tension. It’s almost as if all of those un-exploded fireworks between Karou and Akiva finally explode between Strange and Sarai.

As if they were slightly the same characters.

(Even though they’re really not the same characters.)

And maybe it’s because I’ve listened to Laini Taylor in person, talking about writing. Only once, but the metaphor she used—writing as if she is swimming from buoy to buoy—has stuck with me. So maybe for me, I can’t extricate her as a writer from myself as a reader reading what she creates; I find myself thinking how is she making this story while I’m reading the story.

Of course, none of my I-loved-it-except tugs are enough to keep me from saying that I loved this duology, and I will recommend it to many readers. (Just not young teenagers; this is definitely a fantasy for older teens. Or, you know. Adults who love really great fantasy.)

I hope you read it too.

Two years ago on election night, I made a scrapbook page. Kendell was watching the election results in the other room, but I couldn’t bear it. I could only witness with one of my senses. So I listened while I stood in my little haven with its blue walls and Van Gogh posters, its abundance of exacto knives and collection of paints. The layout I made was about Jake, who wasn’t talking to me at the time; I didn’t know what was going on and making something with his photos was the only way I had to feel any connection to him.

I fussy cut leaf after leaf, snapped off blade after blade from my knife.

I was already grieving for the mess my personal life had become and as the results came in, it felt the whole world was mirroring my little turmoil.

My turmoil roiled large and national.

Some part of me has never been the same after that experience with Jake, even though things are better now.

And some part of me will never be the same in regards to my country, either. Even if the country changes, if politics shift, if the narrow-minded, fear-mongering hordes see reason instead of hatred, I will never forget how that night felt. My nation electing such a vile man.

Two years ago, I wept and raged.

Today, I read an essay by a historian on Facebook about how we’ve seen this before: in the years before the Civil War, when wealthy white men used fear of black people to try to retain their power. When poor white people went along with it because at least they were on the same side as the wealthy men (even if they never benefitted financially, even if their sons died in war). This clicked some little thing in me, like when you snap your watch band together and it stays put. A click: OK. Understanding doesn’t fix it, but at least understanding can happen.

Today I also read a post on Facebook, this one in a feminist group I belong to, wherein the poster posited that maybe we should cut white, educated women some slack, because they (we) had all been taught—indoctrinated—that Hillary was bad. It wasn’t the fault of white, educated women (my demographic), this person suggested, that they voted for trump over a Clinton, because society had taught them to hate her. Which is probably true; if you only look on the surface, if you only listen to one media voice, another Clinton just couldn’t be trusted. Except: I reject that utterly. As a white educated woman I cannot understand how any white, educated woman could vote for that person simply to cast a vote against. I don’t know where these people were educated, and that is saying a lot because I graduated from BYU, one of the most conservative universities in existence. Yet, my education taught me many things. Critical thinking. The understanding that my perspective is not the only one, that my concerns are seen through a lens made from my environment—a lens I can remove. I know many such women, who believe trump was bad but Hillary was evil, and I cannot understand it.

Unless it is the same thing as those poor white men in the 1860s: white educated women want to just stand in the same place as white wealthy men. The ones with the power.

For the past two years, I have felt like I am living in one of those choose-an-adventure books, in a chapter created by someone choosing wrong.

So many wrong choices.

And those trump voters, two years ago. Saying yes it will be bad, but not that bad. We’ll survive.

But not everyone did survive. Or will.

Personally, my love of Americans has faltered. My patriotism is a little bit shaky. I never knew. I never knew.

That we are still so racist.

That we are still bigots.

That wealth and power are the only things that matter.

That we don’t care for the marginalized and the needy.

That we revile people from other countries (except Scandinavia).

I always knew my rights as a woman were threatened. I never stopped knowing we couldn’t stop fighting.

But I didn’t see the rest.

I thought we were courageous, openhearted, willing to look forward.

I thought we would create a world our grandchildren would thrive in.

I thought we were a country that looked at what we feared and then overcame it, not a country that used fear as tool to blind ourselves with.

For two years, I have resisted, just a little, in my heart. I have thought surely there are still enough people to see the truth.

But as another election passes this night, I find myself—in another wrong chapter. Not back where I was at the 2016 election, but somewhere actually darker and less hopeful.

I had my little personal miracle: Jake is turning around and we are healing.

But in this national darkness, I have stopped having hope for a national miracle.

I don’t know how to believe the voices of the wise, the brave, the calm, the rational will be heard again.

I don’t believe my voice matters.

But…here I am. Writing this. Despite knowing it is a silent, unidentifiable drop in the vast Internet ocean. Despite feeling my voice has been silenced.

Tomorrow we will wake up to election results. Will America have changed?

When I was growing up, my dad made us a beautiful yard. There were flowers and roses, gardens marked out with stones, a maple tree, a locust. We had a vegetable garden and a peach tree.

Being outside in that yard made me happy. Even when I was angsty and bitter as a teenager, I’d still sometimes sit out in the backyard, surrounded by the beauty my dad made, look at the mountains and feel a sense of peace.

But I never once—not once—helped him. I didn’t mow the lawn, prune the rosebushes, pull weeds, rake leaves. It was all my dad’s project, and I can’t help but wonder why. It’s not even that he asked us to help and we grumbled about it. It was just never a thing we did. Never a thing I even thought about doing.

But one of my greatest joys in my adult life is having a house with a yard.

If I could have 8 back, or 7, or 12, or 15, here is what I would do: I would ask my dad if he had another rake. I would go out to the backyard, under the honey locust tree, and I would rake leaves with him. Maybe we would talk. Maybe we would work silently. Maybe I would ask him: How do you feel about this space? Do you love it or resent it? Do you wish we helped you, or do you like the solitude?

Tell me how to prune the rosebushes, I’d ask him.

Tell me how to keep the trees healthy, the lawn green, the daffodils still blooming every spring.

And if I had my 20s and 30s back, I would do what I did with my own children, except more often. Let them spill outside into the warm spring air, the chilly fall light, the heat of summer. Give them a little trowel of their own, teach them what is a weed and what is a flower. Call them over to admire a potato bug or a spider, let a worm crawl along their palm, celebrate the random surprise of a garden snake or too. Listen to them laugh, run, play, or just sit in the shade of the trees while I worked.

I loved those days—days they have all grown out of. Now, Kaleb mows the lawn but he grumbles about it; he rakes the leaves and picks up the apples but with deep sighs and not a few eye rolls.

Each of my kids have reached, eventually, that age when they’d rather be anywhere else than helping mom in the yard.

And maybe I can’t understand it because I didn’t ever have to do it when I was a kid. Maybe because it was always a choice rather than a chore for me, I can’t understand the annoyance.

Because for me, working in my garden hasn’t ever felt like actual work. It has always felt like a sort of relationship, a way to tell the world I love it. And a way it tells me back, too; the roses aren’t just roses to me, but a sort of friend. I prune them and fertilize them (and yes, sometimes I talk to them), and they take care of me by giving me color and fragrance.

It is about memory and connection to those who are gone, too. My dad gave me two of my rosebushes, and my dark-blue irises. A different rose bush, the one I planted near the maple tree just a few weeks after Haley was born, I chose because it smells and looks just like one my grandpa Fuzz had. I have purple pansies because one grandma loved them and a patch of purple vinca because a different grandma had them in her garden. Zinnias for Haley’s childhood, hostas for Jake’s; orange California poppies for Nathan and little purple snow crocus for Kaleb’s.

Sweet William and hyacinths for mine.

It’s a sort of alchemy, gardening. You start with seeds or bulbs or roots, add patience and sunshine and water, and then: color and fragrance, a thousand different frilly shapes. It takes work and attention, but it’s a joyful sort for me. I thought flowers were magic when I was a kid and deep down, I still do.

This weekend I spent some morning hours in my yard, raking leaves. I trimmed out the dead asters, I encouraged my poppy which might just bloom a second time this year. I deadheaded a bit. I thought about myself, when I was five and six and loved picking all of the rose petals off of Grandpa Fuzz’s flowers to make cakes for fairies. They aren’t people, of course. They can’t love me back or tell me their stories with words. But they lift my heart—my trees, my flowers. They give me hope. They remind me that there is beauty still left in this world for now. It’s November and some of them are still blooming and I know that is evidence of the way we damage the world, but what can I do? Besides mulch, besides yank away the bindweed, besides stop and appreciate the sheer, remarkable beauty of light through a petal. Besides care for my tiny piece of the world, and relish the care it returns to me.

I always want flowers.

I have wanted to read a book by Rachel Hartman since I read about her young adult novel Seraphina, but somehow it just never made it to the top of my list. So when one of my library coworkers asked me to read her novel Tess of the Road for possible inclusion in a book-award list, I said "absolutely yes." Not only because I wanted to read one of Hartman's books, but also because I love stories that are about traveling, especially by foot.

This novel is set in an alternative version of late medieval Europe: those same strict rules for what women can and can't do, and pious religious mothers protecting their daughters' virtue, and girls going to court to secure a wealthy marriage. The same setting as Seraphina, in fact, and if you liked that book you'll be happy to know she makes an appearance in this one, too. But if you haven't read Seraphina (like me) you'll be just fine without knowing her story. A setting familiar to many fantasy and historical novel readers...except there are dragons.

Dragons and something called quigutl, which I couldn't quite picture (maybe if you have read Seraphina you can picture them); in my head, they are the size of toddlers and a combination of human and lizard. The quitgul are able to make things with metals and so give the novel a sort of steam-punk feel (even if the time period is a bit earlier than the usual steam punk setting).

The main character is Tess, Seraphina's half sister and twin sister to Jeanne. Tess, it seems, has done something awful, something that has ruined her chances at landing a suitable (wealthy) husband. So she has become Jeanne's support staff, scouting out prospects, setting up afternoon encounters and invitations to parties in a quest to get her sister married. After, Tess is to be sent to a convent?but this doesn't sit well with Tess, who is fiery and independent and curious, and besides, Seraphina has given her a pair of beautiful and sturdy boots.

So, rather than being sent to the convent, Tess runs away. She soon meets up with an old friend, Pathka the quigutl. And her adventures commence, the details of which I'll let you discover when you read the book.

I enjoyed many things about this book. Tess comes to some realizations about gender and how society affects women, but the knowledge comes slowly and through her experiences. (In other words, the book avoids the offensive and annoying use of an anachronistic feminism.) Her travels change her, but they don't make her invincible or all-wise or perfect; more intelligent and understanding of the world and herself, but still prone to make mistakes. And I loved the mix of fantasy and almost-history, as if this world is a different version of our own. So while there is a journey, and even the briefest mention of the road going ever onward, and even dragons, it doesn't feel very derivative of Tolkien.

Tess of the Road does, in fact, avoid almost all of the things I tend to dislike in fantasy. Except one: the use of modern slang and speech patterns. This is something I can't abide. For example, Tess tells her father he has to "suck it up," which is a term that originated in World War II, as far as I can tell. When she is on the road, she kicks an old man, who she refers to as a "geezer." But "geezer" didn't mean "old guy" until the 1920s or so. And she refers to something as "vomit-making." This use of slang in a fantasy world is untenable to me; it feels lazy and sloppy, and it almost made me stop reading. But, as the book progressed, this offensive writing vanished.

In the end, I am glad I stuck with Tess and finished out her adventures. I'm not certain I will finish them completely—the book doesn't leave you with a cliff hanger, but it clearly was written with a sequel in mind—but I am glad I told my friend yes and read this.