The Author Behind “The Crossing” Has Seen the Real Stakes of Care Up Close

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’s The Crossing belongs to another category entirely: the book that feels shaped by a life. One senses, page after page, not just expertise but encounter, travel, work, observation, the accumulated texture of listening to people explain what they carry and why.

Malkin is a Ph. D.-trained public health professional, a registered dietitian nutritionist, and a certified diabetes care and education specialist living and working in New York, where she serves high-risk pregnant women, adults, and children in a resource-poor community. She has traveled and worked in many countries. She loves animals. Any one of those details might have stayed separate in another writer’s practice. In The Crossing, they converge.

The book itself is a picture book narrative about four animals from different countries, each living with diabetes and arriving in a new place under emotionally and materially complicated circumstances. It is tempting to call this premise timely, but that word is too thin. What matters is that Malkin has found a form in which her longstanding preoccupations, health, access, migration, cross-cultural encounter, animal life, loneliness, and education, can speak to one another. The result is not a didactic package of issues. It is a cohesive, imaginative world built from things the author appears to know firsthand: how illness structures daily life, how movement across borders can be freighted with fear and hope, how vulnerable people often recognize one another quickly.

That sense of recognition is central to the book’s emotional authority. Malkin treats care not as a sentimental flourish but as a practiced literacy. Her characters notice insulin pumps, dizziness, hunger, the need for glucose, and the burden of carrying supplies. They ask questions that ring with the simplicity of children’s dialogue but also with the precision of people accustomed to looking after themselves and one another. One can feel, behind the scenes, a clinician’s respect for practical knowledge, the kind patients develop outside exam rooms, in airports and kitchens, and on long days away from home.

Yet Malkin is not writing a memoir disguised as children’s literature. What makes The Crossing intriguing is that she uses her background to enrich the fiction without trapping it inside realism. The anthropomorphic animals give her room to translate difficult material into an inviting register. A giraffe in a “Dead Pancreas Society” shirt, a jaguar with a “Diabetes Warrior” slogan, a rhino whose horn becomes an object of curiosity, a shoebill whose beak clattering signals happiness and nerves, these are playful touches, but they are not merely cute. They reveal an author who understands that children approach seriousness more readily when it is attached to a memorable character.

The book’s use of animals to carry human social meaning recalls long traditions, from Aesop to Arnold Lobel, but Malkin’s sensibility is less moralistic and more contemporary. Her animals are not thin embodiments of vice or virtue. They are shaped by structural conditions, cost, habitat loss, family separation, medical need, and by emotional particularity. In that sense, The Crossing belongs to a newer lineage of children’s books that grant young readers access to complexity while refusing cynicism.

What may be most admirable is the restraint. An author with Malkin’s credentials could easily have overexplained, layered the text with too much medical information, or turned the narrative into a vehicle for best practices. Instead, she trusts the story. The facts are there; the educational sections are present, but the book’s pulse comes from encounter. That choice suggests a literary instinct as important as expertise: the knowledge that readers remember feeling before they remember instruction.

It is also worth acknowledging the courage of writing across categories. Picture books are often underestimated because their surfaces are accessible. But to write one that addresses chronic illness, immigration, and environmental vulnerability without scaring children or patronizing them requires tonal control. Malkin’s professional life may have prepared her for just that balancing act. In care work, after all, one is constantly translating serious information into forms people can bear.

In The Crossing, Diana L. Malkin emerges not simply as a specialist with a message but as a writer whose concerns are coherent and humane. She has taken the materials of her working life and transformed them into a story that invites children to think expansively about bodies, borders, and belonging.

Buy The Crossing to encounter that rare thing: a children’s book that feels informed not by market trends, but by a writer’s actual, hard-won understanding of how people survive.