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. This is not a story that hurries toward cheerful togetherness. Its first great strength is patience.

Malkin allows the characters to remain uncertain of one another for a while. She lets them be tired, hungry, awkward, and slightly wary. In the current climate of children’s publishing, where stories often rush to announce their moral destination, that patience feels refreshing and true.

The threshold space matters. These characters are not fully at home in the place they left, nor are they secure in the one they have entered. They are suspended between worlds.

Malkin builds the story out of that in-between condition, and in doing so, she captures something that many books miss: being new somewhere is not one emotion. It is several emotions happening at once, before any of them have settled.

What gives the story its particular sharpness is the way diabetes interacts with that state of arrival. Travel is destabilizing enough on its own. Add chronic illness, and every delay, missed meal, or stressful moment takes on new weight.

Malkin, clearly writing from experience and knowledge, does not dramatize this beyond proportion. She simply lets it exist as part of the scene. Someone feels low. Another character notices. A juice box matters. A bag full of supplies matters. The body, in other words, remains fully present. This is a quiet but significant literary choice. Too many stories about migration or belonging float above the material life of the body. The Crossing never does.

The result is an intimacy that feels earned. As the characters talk, they begin to disclose why they left home, family, work, love, the search for recognition, and the pursuit of a life that might be more manageable. Malkin spaces these revelations carefully. Each one enlarges the story without overwhelming it. Children can follow the emotional logic because it is built from recognizable needs. Adults will hear the larger social reality resonating beneath the page.

There is one especially resonant line in the book, when a character says, “I feel so lost here.” It is the kind of sentence children can understand instantly, but it also contains the whole architecture of the book. Lost can mean geographically disoriented, emotionally untethered, socially unrecognized, or simply too tired to hold oneself together. Malkin’s skill lies in allowing such a simple line to function at all those levels.

The animal cast helps, too, not because animals make the subject easier in a reductive sense, but because they make visible the awkwardness of first impressions. A horn, a beak, a set of sharp teeth, height, stillness, all these details create social uncertainty that children can read immediately. The story then shows how that uncertainty changes once questions replace assumptions.

By the end, The Crossing has offered something more valuable than a generic message about friendship. It has given readers a map of what it feels like to be new, vulnerable, and not yet understood. It has also been suggested that belonging is not magic. It begins when someone asks, notices, and responds.

Buy The Crossing for any child who has moved, felt out of place, or wondered what it means to enter an unfamiliar room, and for a beautifully measured story about the fragile beginning of home.