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From the Author's Desk
Explore insights, stories, and educational resources inspired by The Crossing and its characters.
There is a particular kind of ambition in children’s literature that announces itself quietly. It does not arrive with gimmick or sermon, but with the confidence that young readers can bear complexity if it is offered with clarity and grace….
In “The Crossing,” Diana L. Malkin treats chronic illness not as a lesson plan, but as part of a full and complicated life.
Many books for children about illness are written with worthy intentions and deadened prose…..
“The Crossing” offers young readers a humane, emotionally intelligent story about movement, uncertainty, and the search for home.
Children’s literature has always had a border problem. It likes journeys, departures, thresholds, and strange lands, but it often prefers them in mythic form…
Some children’s books arrive polished but airless, as if they were developed in a conference room dedicated to relevance. Their themes are correct, their messaging vetted, their prose obedient…
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…
There is a particular kind of ambition in children’s literature that announces itself quietly. It does not arrive with gimmick or sermon, but with the confidence that young readers can bear complexity if it is offered with clarity and grace….
In “The Crossing,” Diana L. Malkin treats chronic illness not as a lesson plan, but as part of a full and complicated life.
Many books for children about illness are written with worthy intentions and deadened prose. They explain, reassure, simplify, and, in the process, drain experience of its strangeness….
Children’s literature has always had a border problem. It likes journeys, departures, thresholds, and strange lands, but it often prefers them in mythic form, wardrobes, rabbit holes, and enchanted forests, rather than in the more ordinary and morally charged terms by which actual people move through the world…
Diana L. Malkin brings clinical expertise, global awareness, and literary restraint to a children’s book with unusual depth.
Some children’s books arrive polished but airless, as if they were developed in a conference room dedicated to relevance. Their themes are correct, their messaging vetted, their prose obedient…
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. ..
In Diana L. Malkin’s “The Crossing,” kindness is not a soft virtue. It is a form of public safety.
There is a certain kind of children’s book that asks only to reassure. It smooths the sharp edges off the world, turns conflict into a manageable hiccup, and offers comfort in tidy, prepackaged doses…
“The Crossing” turns diabetes care into a story, texture, and lived reality, not just information.
The most moving parts of illness are often the least dramatic. Not the diagnosis alone, not the crisis scene that fiction loves, but the steady labor that follows…
Diana L. Malkin’s “The Crossing” meets young readers where immigration actually begins, with hunger, fear, and the hope of being understood.
Children absorb the politics of a country long before they can parse its vocabulary. They hear how adults talk about outsiders, who is welcome, who is feared, who gets called a burden, and who is described as deserving…
In “The Crossing,” Diana L. Malkin builds suspense not through spectacle, but through attention.
The loudest books for children are not always the ones that stay with them. Some vanish almost as soon as the final page turns, their jokes spent, their pace exhausted…
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…
“The Crossing” never talks down to its audience, and that may be its boldest accomplishment.
One of the easiest ways to fail children as readers is to underestimate their appetite for complexity. ..
Diana L. Malkin uses a giraffe, jaguar, rhino, and shoebill to explore vulnerability without cliché.
There is always a risk when writers turn to animals to tell human stories. The symbolism can feel too neat, the cuteness too easy, the emotional stakes too softened by fur and feathers…
“The Crossing” speaks to young readers, but its deepest insights are just as sharp for adults.
Some picture books are one-way gifts, clearly built for the child alone, with adults serving as a delivery mechanism. Others create a subtler kind of exchange. The child hears the story. The adult hears the undertow.
Diana L. Malkin’s “The Crossing” proves that picture books can hold more complexity than many novels dare.
There is a long tradition of underestimating picture books, as if brevity were a sign of shallowness and illustration a guarantee of simplicity.
“The Crossing” does not shout its message. It shows, with unusual grace, how people keep one another alive.
Many books about empathy insist on themselves too loudly. They announce their virtue, underline their lessons, and leave readers admiring the intention more than the art.
In Diana L. Malkin’s “The Crossing,” kindness begins not with sentiment, but with the difficult art of noticing correctly.
There is a particular kind of children’s book that wants to be praised for its virtue before it has fully earned the reader’s trust. ..
“The Crossing” turns diabetes from a topic into a lived reality, full of planning, humor, worry, and resilient grace.
There is a persistent problem in the literature for young readers about chronic illness. Too often, the condition arrives as a moral device..
Diana L. Malkin’s “The Crossing” avoids slogans and offers something more durable, a humane education in why people leave home.
The difficulty with writing for children about immigration is not that the subject is too complicated. It is that adults tend to simplify it so badly before children ever encounter it…
“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. ..
Diana L. Malkin writes about isolation not as an abstract sadness, but as the experience of carrying invisible burdens in public.
Loneliness is a difficult subject for children’s literature, not because children fail to feel it, but because adults so often prefer to rush them past it…
“The Crossing” makes kindness feel specific, active, and grounded in knowledge rather than vague good intentions.
It is easy to praise care in the abstract. It is much harder to write convincingly about what care actually looks like when a body is in distress, when a stranger is frightened, when a person in front of you carries needs you do not yet understand.
Diana L. Malkin assumes young audiences can handle complexity and that faith gives “The Crossing” much of its power.
One of the most common ways children’s literature goes wrong is by mistaking clarity for simplification.
Animal stories can fail in two opposite ways. They can become sentimental, relying on cuteness to do emotional work the writing has not earned, or they can become heavy-handed allegories, with every feather or hoof functioning like a lecture in costume…
“The Crossing” understands that home can mean family, safety, medicine, familiarity, and the hope of finally being known.
Home is one of the most overused and underexamined words in children’s literature. It is invoked sentimentally, often as if its meaning were stable and obvious. But for many people, children included, home is a layered and shifting thing.
Diana L. Malkin turns the contents of a diabetes bag into a portrait of vulnerability, responsibility, and resilience.
There is something almost novelistic in the way a person’s belongings can reveal them.
“The Crossing” speaks to present anxieties about borders, health, and belonging by staying close to lived experience instead of fashionable rhetoric.
There are books that chase relevance so hard they become dated before they have had a chance to settle into a reader’s life.
Diana L. Malkin shows young readers how health, money, and migration shape lives, without ever turning the story into a lecture.
Systems are notoriously hard to write for children because they are usually invisible until they fail.
In “The Crossing,” companionship is not just comforting. It is one of the ways a new life becomes possible.
Friendship in children’s books is often presented as a moral good in the vaguest sense. It is nice to have friends. Friends make things more fun. Friends help you learn to share.
Diana L. Malkin transforms a public waiting space into a chamber of uncertainty, recognition, and fragile hope.
Few settings seem less promising for a children’s book than an immigration line at an airport. It sounds bureaucratic, impersonal, slow, and devoid of wonder.
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 treats lived experience as a source of wisdom, not just something to be explained by experts.
There is a hierarchy built into many stories about illness. Knowledge flows from above. The doctor or adult explains. The person with the condition listens.
“The Crossing” quietly restores labor, responsibility, and economic pressure to the emotional life of a picture book.
Children’s literature often handles work as background scenery. Adults go off somewhere vague called “their job,” and the story returns to the child’s emotional life as though economic reality were merely offstage machinery.
Warm endings are easy to fake. In picture books especially, there is often pressure to close with comfort, whether or not the story has emotionally earned it. The result can feel pleasant in the moment and vaguely false after the page is turned. One of the quiet accomplishments of Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing is that its ending does not fall into that trap. It offers solace, but it reaches that solace honestly.
Diana L. Malkin uses one of children’s literature’s oldest forms to speak to borders, devices, medicine, and modern precarity.
Animal stories are ancient machinery. They have carried fables, moral instruction, comic adventures, and emotional allegory for centuries.
“The Crossing” lingers because it understands that visible objects and invisible burdens are always traveling together.
Some books stay in the mind because of a plot twist or a particularly dazzling sentence. Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing lingers for a different reason.
Warm endings are easy to fake. In picture books especially, there is often pressure to close with comfort, whether or not the story has emotionally earned it. The result can feel pleasant in the moment and vaguely false after the page is turned. One of the quiet accomplishments of Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing is that its ending does not fall into that trap. It offers solace, but it reaches that solace honestly.
Diana L. Malkin uses one of children’s literature’s oldest forms to speak to borders, devices, medicine, and modern precarity.
Animal stories are ancient machinery. They have carried fables, moral instruction, comic adventures, and emotional allegory for centuries.