Why “The Crossing” Feels So Different From Most Children’s Books Right Now

Diana L. Malkin understands that suspense can come from waiting, uncertainty, and the fragile beginnings of connection.
There is a pace to contemporary children’s publishing that often mistakes velocity for engagement. Pages turn quickly, quips land on cue, plots move with the efficiency of a bedtime routine engineered for adult relief.
Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing chooses a different rhythm. It does not dazzle by acceleration. It holds attention through waiting: the airport line, the hesitation before conversation, the gradual emergence of trust among strangers who share more than they first realize.
That slower pacing is one of the book’s most interesting formal choices. It mirrors the emotional situation of its characters, who are not embarking on a grand quest so much as existing in a state of suspension. They have arrived, but have not yet belonged. They are surrounded by people, but not yet connected. They are carrying supplies, histories, and private worries, but have not yet spoken them aloud. Malkin understands that this kind of in-between state has its own dramatic charge. Anyone who has ever entered a new school, moved cities, sat in a waiting room, or crossed a border will recognize it immediately.
The book, written by a New York-based diabetes educator and dietitian, centers on four animals from different countries who meet while traveling, all of them living with diabetes and all of them carrying distinct motives for leaving home. That summary might suggest a social issues picture book, and in one sense it is. But Malkin’s real achievement lies in how she choreographs revelation. Information arrives conversationally. A medical need emerges from a moment of dizziness. A backstory comes out in the halting cadence of self-introduction. Supplies are shown not as exposition but as the natural contents of lives already in progress.
This method creates an unusual intimacy. The reader comes to know the characters the way people often come to know one another in life: through fragments, practical disclosures, a joke here, an admission there. “Do you all miss your home?” one asks, and the question feels larger than the page can contain. The book is full of these plainspoken lines that open into deeper emotional territory. They are especially effective because Malkin resists decorating them. She trusts simplicity.
The trust extends to the book’s treatment of children. Many adult writers underestimate how attentive young readers are to tone. They can sense when a story is hurrying them toward a moral. The Crossing avoids that problem by making room for pause. There is time to notice a horn, a shirt slogan, a beak clatter, a shared pile of diabetes supplies. These moments of observation are not filler. They are the building blocks of relation. The book argues, structurally as much as thematically, that friendship begins in attention.
That attention is also what allows the book’s educational material to breathe. Malkin includes explanations of type 1 and type 2 diabetes, as well as factual material about the animals and the reasons people may immigrate. In less assured hands, such sections might feel bolted on. Here, they feel of a piece with the narrative because the story has already established curiosity as its driving engine. The characters want to know about one another. The book extends that desire to the reader.
The author’s professional background gives the book further gravity. A clinician who works with medically vulnerable populations learns quickly that rushed listening is often failed listening. One suspects that experience informs the text’s patience with hesitation, fear, and partial disclosure. Malkin writes as someone attuned to the fact that what matters most is not always said first.
That sensitivity may be why The Crossing feels larger than its page count. It is a modestly scaled picture book with a serious understanding of transition. It knows that arrivals are rarely clean, that bodies can betray us at stressful moments, that strangers become companions through incremental acts of recognition. And it knows, crucially, that children already understand what it is to wait for belonging.
Buy The Crossing for its warmth, certainly, but also for its uncommon formal intelligence: this is a book that knows how to slow down at precisely the moments when slowing down is what makes us human.