The cover to Abeni’s Song 2 is out! The book is still a ways off (April 2025), but we can talk about it!

As many may know, I made my first foray into writing novels for younger readers with the debut of my middle grade fantasy Abeni’s Song (August 2023). It was a project many years in the making. And I filled it with all the magic, adventure, and diversity my younger self would have wanted–not only with characters of color, but immersed in a setting inspired by West African and African Diaspora cultures, folklore, and cosmologies.

Abeni’s Song introduced readers to a young reluctant heroine, whose life in a small village is turned upside down–when the old woman who lives out in the forest appears on the day of harvest festival, Abeni’s birthday, with a terrible message:

You ignored my warnings. It’s too late to run. They are coming.

Abeni learns that the old woman hasn’t come to save them, only to collect one child as payment for her years of service and protection. When warriors with burning blades storm the village and a man with a cursed flute plays an impossibly alluring song, everyone Abeni has ever known and loved is captured and marched toward far-off ghost ships set for even more distant lands.

But not Abeni. She escapes the warriors in the clutches of the old woman, magically whisked into the forest away from all she’s ever known. There she begins her unwanted magical apprenticeship, her journey to escape the witch, and her impossible mission to bring her people home. Along the way she meets new friends–Nyomi, a talkative porcupine spirit who loves to dance, and Zaneeya, a haughty panther spirit who is not too fond of mortals. The three will find themselves on an enchanting adventure, running afoul of body-stealing Bush Babies, encountering a giant mimic salamander, and coming face-to-face with the terrifying Goat Man, who steals away children through their dreams.

Book 2, Abeni and the Kingdom of Gold, picks up shortly after the first ended, featuring Abeni, Nyomi, Zaneeya, and Asha. Keeping the synopsis under wraps for now, but you can glean a bit from the cover. This is an Abeni who is no longer the wide-eyed village girl from the first book. Now, she’s about to see kingdoms and cities for the first time–like the mysterious Gold Kingdom–and learn that the world is a much larger and complicated place than she ever imagined. She and her companions are also in greater danger. That danger stalks them now. Hunts them. It can be glimpsed in the menacing figures directly behind her on the cover: one, an older girl with weapons descending from the shadows; the other, one of the infamous Bat Riders she encountered in Book 1–both minions of the evil Witch Priest who yet seeks to bend all to his will.

Will Abeni be able to live up to these challenges? Guess you’ll have to read and find out…