Small Ghosts

Ayo is eleven years old when she discovers that her grandmother's navigational tradition — the rituals, the origin stories, the ancestral lineage — is partly invented. The genuine practices are real. The framework around them is fiction.

The discovery shatters Ayo's world. But the entity that chose her — a small, gentle being that hums in the navigational medium — stays. The entity doesn't care about the framework. The entity cares about the practice. And as Ayo navigates the wreckage of a tradition built on a lie, she discovers that honesty might be a stronger foundation than mythology, and that the strange companions who choose the children of navigators may be the only continuity that matters.

A coming-of-age story about inheritance, honesty, and the courage to build something true from something partly false. Small Ghosts is the fifth novel in The Navigations.