Why the Humor in “The Crossing” Matters So Much

Diana L. Malkin knows that wit is not the opposite of seriousness. It is one of the ways vulnerable people stay fully alive.
Books about illness, immigration, and loneliness often become solemn too quickly. The seriousness of the subjects seems to demand a certain heaviness, as if laughter might somehow diminish the moral stakes.
Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing is refreshingly wiser than that. It understands that humor can coexist with fear, and that in many difficult lives it is one of the mechanisms by which dignity and connection are preserved.
The humor in the book is not broad or gimmicky. It lives in the details. A giraffe wearing a “Dead Pancreas Society” shirt. A jaguar in a “Diabetes Warrior” top. A character marveling at the sheer mountain of diabetes supplies everyone has packed. A beak clatter that signals happiness and nerves. These touches are genuinely funny, but they are never trivial.
Instead, they make the characters more believable, more human in their animal forms, because real people living under pressure often joke precisely to keep pressure from becoming all-consuming.
This tonal flexibility is one of the book’s great strengths. Malkin is writing about children’s exposure to hard realities, chronic illness, migration, and being new in a place, and she knows that one way to keep the story open rather than oppressive is to let humor circulate through it. The wit creates air inside the narrative. It allows readers to breathe even while the stakes remain clear.
There is also something ethically important about this. Vulnerable people are too often portrayed either as tragic figures or as saints of endurance. Humor disrupts both distortions. It reminds the reader that the characters are not examples. They are personalities. They complain, tease, marvel, and laugh. Their inner lives are not suspended just because their circumstances are hard.
The diabetes scenes especially benefit from this tonal intelligence. A pile of supplies can be educational, but it can also be absurd in the best way. The comedy of so much necessary stuff does not erase the burden. It reveals how strange and specific the labor of chronic illness can be.
Children reading the scene learn not only about preparedness, but about the emotional texture that often surrounds it. People cope with seriousness by joking around it.
Humor also helps friendships feel real. Characters rarely bond over instruction alone. They bond through recognition, surprise, and moments that break the tension.
In The Crossing, humor becomes one of the first shared languages. That makes the eventual warmth of the book feel less manufactured and more earned.
Malkin’s prose handles this balance with confidence. She never signals too loudly that a line is meant to be funny. She lets the humor arise from character and situation. Because of that, the book avoids the tonal whiplash that sometimes mars issue-driven fiction. The lightness feels integrated, not pasted on.
By the end, the reader understands that humor in The Crossing is not a decorative extra. It is part of the book’s ethical world. It allows the characters to remain vivid and alive in their full range of feeling. It protects the story from solemn flattening. And it offers children a valuable lesson: serious lives are not humorless lives. People can be scared and funny, vulnerable and playful, prepared and absurd all at once.
Buy The Crossing for its compassion, intelligence, and beautifully judged wit, and for a story that knows laughter is often one of the ways people carry one another through uncertainty.