Mallow and The Cracked Moon

The moon has been cracked for nine months.

The crops are failing. Liquid Starlight is running thin. And in the Valley of Gourds, baker and tinkerer Mallow Threadwell is running out of sensible ways to pretend everything will be fine.

Then she finds the recipe her late grandmother hid beneath the flour bin.

CAKE OF ETERNAL CONTENTMENT.
FOR WHEN NOTHING GROWS.
DO NOT BAKE THIS FOR HAPPINESS.

Unfortunately, the recipe comes with a magical needle, an impossible network of forgotten stations, a suspiciously well-mannered giant toad, and evidence that Mallow's grandmother knew far more about the cracked moon than she ever admitted.

Soon Mallow is travelling beyond the Valley into salt wastelands, ancient reservoirs, moving forests and drowned wetlands, uncovering a repair system built to regulate the Starlight that keeps the world alive.

But the old system has a problem.

It was designed to let a handful of people decide what was best for everyone else.

And that may be what broke it.

With the moon worsening and the world divided between too much Starlight and too little, Mallow must find another way - one that leaves room for disagreement, refusal, change and the uncomfortable possibility that no single person should ever be allowed to decide what "saved" looks like.

Warm, strange and quietly hopeful, Mallow and the Cracked Moon is an adult cosy fantasy about grief, cake, ecological collapse, impossible bureaucracy, enormous toads - and discovering that sometimes the answer isn't happiness.

Sometimes it is simply enough.