Why This New Children’s Book Changes the Way We Talk About Diabetes
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. One finishes them admiring the effort and forgetting the pages.
Diana L. Malkin’s The Crossing takes a riskier path. It is certainly educational; there are facts about diabetes, migration, and endangered animals built into its architecture, but its real achievement is that it does not feel like a lesson disguised as a story. It feels like a story in which knowledge is inseparable from survival.
That distinction matters. Malkin, whose professional life is rooted in diabetes care and nutrition education, writes from a place of unusual authority, but she does not wield expertise as a blunt instrument. Instead, she embeds it in the ordinary drama of movement: travel fatigue, hunger, the anxiety of unfamiliar surroundings, the choreography of supplies that must always be kept near.
In The Crossing, diabetes is not an abstract condition appended for representation. It is a lived logistics, a daily negotiation with the body that shapes mood, timing, risk, and companionship.
The book follows four animal characters from different parts of the world, each arriving with a different relationship to illness, home, and uncertainty. What The Crossing understands, with rare delicacy, is that children can absorb medical truth when it is attached to human feeling rather than instructional tone. Blood sugar is not discussed as a frightening mystery. It is discussed because dizziness arrives, because hunger matters, and because being in transit makes the body harder to predict. The book’s educational passages, which explain type 1 and type 2 diabetes in plain language, are anchored by that narrative reality. Malkin never loses sight of the fact that knowledge is most useful when it answers a felt question.
This is especially important in the context of children’s books, where chronic illness has long been either euphemized or overdramatized. Malkin does neither. Her characters do not become saints of endurance, nor are they reduced to their diagnoses. They are funny, shy, proud, practical, and lonely. They want things beyond stability: family, work, love, kinship, recognition.
The fact of diabetes complicates those desires but does not replace them. That is a subtle but meaningful corrective to the cultural habit of narrating sick people as if their interior lives end where treatment begins.
If the book has a larger cultural resonance, it lies here. At a moment when discussions of public health often flatten into policy, panic, or personal blame, The Crossing restores scale. It reminds readers that chronic illness is managed in airports, backpacks, queues, friendships, and moments of improvisation. It is managed in public, under stress, with limited privacy and unequal resources. For children who live with diabetes, that recognition may feel like relief. For those who do not, it may produce the more valuable thing: understanding.
Malkin’s background sharpens the book’s seriousness. She works with high-risk pregnant women, adults, and children in a resource-poor community, an experience that seems to inform the manuscript’s attention to cost, access, and strain. One character mentions expensive medical supplies. Another arrives with the burden of economic necessity. Such details are not incidental. They place the book in the real world, where health is never only biological. It is also shaped by money, geography, and bureaucracy.
Perhaps that is the book’s most persuasive quality: it trusts readers with reality while refusing despair. In The Crossing, illness does not isolate characters into silence. It becomes, paradoxically, one of the things that allows them to recognize one another. They do not bond because they are identical. They bond because each knows something about carrying what others cannot see.
For families looking for language around diabetes, the book may prove useful. For readers interested in what children’s literature can do when it respects lived experience, it offers something more lasting.
Buy The Crossing for a child, a classroom, or a waiting room shelf, and for the rare pleasure of a book that teaches by first paying attention to how people actually live.