If you enjoyed Humans Don’t Have Horns, please request it at your local library. Libraries are how books find new readers who were not even looking for them.
The paperback is available for libraries to order through Ingram. The audiobook is already distributed widely across major platforms. If you use Libby, I do not think it’s there yet, but patron requests are exactly how librarians decide what to bring in.
I’ve written in the past about the man who inspired a new character in the second book of the A Crown of Blood and Magic trilogy.
But there’s also a man who inspired Hunter, one of the POV characters in Humans Don’t Have Horns. In my eyes, he embodies the exact moral conflict I tried to articulate in that chapter.
His name starts with an E, so let’s just call him E. Throughout his professional life, E worked with people struggling with severe mental health conditions. An entrepreneur at heart, he founded several meaningful, innovative NGOs that improved the lives of thousands. He even received a UN award for his contribution. Married and a father of four, he is a respected leader in his community and beyond.
Knowing his work closely, there isn’t enough I can say to express how much I appreciate his contribution.
But at one point in his life, E suffered kidney failure and needed a transplant. While waiting for a kidney, he chose not to stay in the line within the public health system he belonged to. Instead, he traveled to China and paid a substantial amount of money for a kidney transplant there.
Over the years, there have been many reports of forced organ harvesting in China from prisoners of conscience, primarily practitioners of Falun Gong, but also Uyghurs and others. E cannot claim ignorance. These reports have been widely known, and he is an educated man.
Even if his kidney was not taken by force, he knows that in first-world countries, it is illegal to buy organs for a reason. The best-case scenario is deeply troubling: that the kidney came from someone so desperate for money that they felt they had no real choice but to sell part of their body.
That’s why I find his story so haunting. His life’s work shows that he is a good person who genuinely tries to better the world. And yet, when it came to his own health, he chose the shortcut, knowing there was a real possibility someone else was severely harmed for it.
He did something immoral, and still, I find it extremely hard to judge him.
Because while I can say it’s wrong to benefit from an organ taken from someone who is desperate or even worst unwilling, I have also never been forced to face a dilemma like that. I was never deeply sick. I had never feared for my life from illness.
In a way, that’s Hunter’s story.
Yes, it’s a fantasy world, and Hunter’s choices are far worse because he knows that, unlike organ donation, his victims will ultimately pay with their lives. But unlike E, Hunter isn’t doing it for himself. He’s doing it for his child, and as a parent, that is a motivation I can relate to even more than E’s motivation. It’s one thing to be immoral for your own benefit. It’s another thing to be immoral for the benefit of your child.
Hunter was my way of showing how complicated Amada is, and how complicated our world is, too.
We all like to believe we know what the right thing is, but I wanted to challenge that certainty.
It’s easy to be moral when morality costs you nothing.
It’s much harder when the price is your health, your survival, or the life of someone you love.
None of this makes Hunter a good man, and none of it makes his actions forgivable.
It only means this: we only truly get to call ourselves good when we’ve been tested.
I’ve finished the second draft of the second book in A Crown of Blood and Magic this week 🥳 While there is much more to do, the plot is done!
Comment below, what would you like to read about the book that is in the making in the next post of The writing of the A Crown of Blood and Magic trilogy
