Children of the Broken Calabash

Children of the Broken Calabash
A Tale of Forgotten Spirits and Forbidden Songs
In a village where the wind no longer sings and the calabashes remain cracked from stories never told, a girl named Nia stumbles upon a sacred secret buried beneath the earth, an old gourd, broken and humming with silence.
The elders say some songs are never meant to be heard.
The children whisper about spirits that still walk backward into memory.
And when the rains fail for the fifth season in a row, it becomes clear something old is stirring.
As Nia pieces together fragments of her family's past, she begins to see what others cannot: names that were buried, pacts that were broken, and spirits waiting to be remembered. With the help of a quiet boy who speaks in riddles and a grandmother whose stories were once banned, Nia journeys deep into the village's ancestral past, where magic, myth, and memory blur.
But reclaiming truth comes at a cost.
Can she hold the weight of forgotten history and still walk forward?
Children of the Broken Calabash is a beautifully layered coming-of-age novel woven with African folklore, poetic mystery, and timeless questions about identity, silence, and the inheritance of memory. Written for readers aged 12-17 but rich enough for adults who believe in the power of story, it invites you into a world where every name matters and every silence has a reason.