A Small Book With Big Questions About Home, Health, and Belonging

 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 best books in the form prove otherwise. They condense. They distill. They find the exact image or sentence through which a large emotional or social problem can become graspable. Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing belongs firmly in that lineage. It is a compact book, but the questions it raises are enormous: What makes a place feel safe? What does illness demand from the community? Why do people leave home? What turns strangers into something closer than strangers? That breadth might sound unwieldy. It is not. Malkin organizes the book around a beautifully manageable premise. Four animals from different countries meet in an immigration line while traveling to a new place. They all live with diabetes. They are all carrying physic...