What This Picture Book Gets Exactly Right About Being New Somewhere

  “The Crossing” captures the fragile psychology of arrival, before belonging is secure and before loneliness has found a language. There is a particular emotional weather that accompanies arrival in a new place. It is not simply excitement or fear, though both may be present. It is a more unstable mixture of vigilance, fatigue, hope, self-consciousness, and bodily exposure. Adults know this feeling from airports, hospital waiting rooms, first days at new jobs, sudden moves, classrooms entered late, and cities where the streets do not yet speak back. Children know it too, often more acutely than adults imagine. Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing is unusual because it understands this emotional weather so well and renders it in terms that young readers can grasp. The book centers on four animals from different countries who meet in an immigration line while arriving somewhere new. All four live with diabetes. All four are carrying both literal supplies and emotional burdens. Th...