What This Book Gets Right About Being New in a Strange Place

Diana L. Malkin’s “The Crossing” captures the emotional weather of arrival with unusual precision.
To be new somewhere is to become suddenly aware of the body. You notice how hungry you are, how tired, how loud the room feels, how uncertain your footing is. You notice other people’s faces and wonder what they read in yours. Few picture books have much interest in that vulnerable interval. They prefer the before and after, the departure, the happy settlement, the lesson learned. Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing is more interested in the threshold itself.
That choice gives the book its emotional exactness. Malkin begins with four animals in transit, all of them living with diabetes, all of them arriving in a new country, all of them carrying different hopes and burdens. They meet in an immigration line.
It is one of those settings that children can understand even if they have never experienced it directly. A line is a place of waiting. An airport is a place of noise and confusion. Put fatigue and medical vulnerability into that mix, and the ordinary becomes charged.
The book’s great intelligence lies in how carefully it observes that charge. Nobody here is making grand speeches about identity. They are trying to get through a difficult moment. One character feels dizzy. Another has juice. They ask one another basic questions. They reveal, slowly, why they have come. The scene is small in scale and large in implication. Arrival, Malkin suggests, is less a triumphant event than a condition of exposure.
That insight places The Crossing in a richer literary tradition than its child-friendly format might initially suggest. Good literature about migration often begins with sensory dislocation, the body registering a change before the mind has fully narrated it.
Malkin translates that truth for young readers with admirable economy. She keeps the language plain, but the emotional architecture is sophisticated. Hunger, uncertainty, and homesickness become the first vocabulary of immigration.
The characters’ reasons for leaving home are varied, and that variety is one of the book’s strengths. One seeks family. One seeks a partner. One seeks work. One seeks another of her kind. There are also concerns about healthcare and cost.
Together, these motives create a picture of movement that is more honest than the simplified narratives children are often given. People move for overlapping reasons. Need and desire, love and economics, health and loneliness often travel together.
Malkin’s background in diabetes care and public health appears to inform the story’s realism. She knows that illness alters the experience of every environment. A trip becomes a medical calculation. A delay becomes a risk. A snack becomes an intervention. Yet the book never turns this reality into grim theater.
Instead, it folds it into the fabric of ordinary life. Diabetes is neither hidden nor dramatized beyond proportion. It is simply part of what the characters must manage while trying to build a future.
There is a humane generosity in that treatment. Many books about chronic illness for children isolate the condition from the rest of life, as if the diagnosis itself were the whole story. The Crossing refuses that reduction. Its characters are not just patients. They are workers, dreamers, lovers, family members, outsiders, and potential friends. Their conditions matter, but so do their ambitions and their loneliness.
The use of animals adds another layer of emotional accessibility. Children can enter the story through visual and behavioral differences: a tall giraffe, a shy rhino, a vigilant shoebill, a jaguar whose teeth make others wary. These details create an immediate physical world while also echoing the deeper question beneath the book: What does it feel like to inhabit a body others may misunderstand at first glance?
What lingers after reading The Crossing is the sharpness of its threshold vision. Malkin has written a book about the moment before one belongs, and she has done so without false drama or false reassurance. She understands that newness is not just exciting. It is lonely, exhausting, and full of small acts of interpretation. Who is safe? Who understands. Who might become familiar.
For children who have moved, changed schools, entered unfamiliar social spaces, or watched adults navigate arrival, this recognition may feel profound. For those who have not, the book offers an education of feeling. It teaches them what it is like to be the person at the edge of the room, carrying more than anyone can see.
Buy The Crossing for a beautiful, thoughtful story about what it means to arrive, and why being truly welcomed can change the emotional shape of an entire world.