The Book That Makes an Airport Line Feel Like a Whole Emotional World

  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. And yet in Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing , that space becomes one of the most emotionally intelligent settings in recent picture book writing. This is not because the airport is magically transformed into fantasy, but because Malkin understands what waiting in public can do to the body and mind. An immigration line is a perfect chamber of threshold feeling. You have left one place but not yet entered another. You are visible to strangers and institutions at the very moment you feel least in control. You are tired, often hungry, and uncertain about what happens next. For Malkin’s four animal characters, all of whom are living with diabetes and all of whom have traveled far, the setting intensifies everything...