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. That is the book’s brilliance. It begins in a space where public systems and private vulnerability meet.

The line, then, is not just a backdrop. It is the condition that shapes the story’s first emotional truths. The characters are near one another but do not yet know one another. Their bodies require things. Their luggage is full of practical necessities. Their reasons for coming are private, at first. The suspense comes from the question of whether any of this can be made shareable in time.

Malkin uses the setting to excellent effect. She lets practical need become the beginning of intimacy. A symptom appears. Supplies matter. Conversation opens. The impersonality of the airport starts to break down because the characters decide to treat one another as more than passing bodies in line. In this sense, the book is doing something profoundly civic. It asks how public space becomes humanized, and it answers by paying attention.

The setting also allows Malkin to stage a children’s introduction to immigration that feels emotionally exact rather than didactic. Airports are familiar enough to many children to be graspable, yet strange enough to carry dramatic tension. The line between countries becomes, in the story, a line between loneliness and companionship as well. It is a place where one can still feel unclaimed by the new world.

What keeps the story from becoming claustrophobic is the richness of what the characters bring into the space. Their different species, their diabetes supplies, their worries, their motives, all of this creates texture. The airport line becomes not a dead zone of bureaucracy, but a temporary meeting ground of histories.

By the end, the setting itself has changed meaning. It is no longer merely a place of waiting. It is the place where a group first learned how to notice, help, and begin trusting one another. Few books do so much with so seemingly little. That is a sign of genuine narrative skill.

Buy The Crossing for a memorable story that proves even the most ordinary public space can become meaningful when a writer is alert to the emotional drama already inside it.