Crossings

The most impressive thing about Crossings is how steadily Laurel Ferejohn refuses melodrama even while writing about lives hemmed in by it. Set in Hawaii in 1968, with Vietnam pressing against every decision, the novel follows Tomby, a young Marine living under constant suspicion, and Valetta, a nineteen-year-old wife stranded inside a marriage that has already begun to harden into harm. Their bond becomes the quiet center of a story otherwise shaped by menace, loneliness, and the exhausting labor of concealment.

Ferejohn understands that oppression rarely arrives as a single event. It accumulates. For Tomby, that means barracks cruelty, ritualized humiliation, and the impossible strain of guarding every gesture. For Valetta, it means the deadening routines and emotional volatility of life with Dixon, plus the dawning realization that endurance is not the same as adulthood. The novel tracks both with unusual care. Neither character is reduced to a symbol. Each gets a full inner weather, complete with flashes of humor, memory, doubt, and longing.

Ferejohn does not overstate the friendship between Tomby and Valetta, which allows it to feel more radical. They see one another clearly before either can fully save himself or herself. That recognition gives Crossings its pulse. A drive, a conversation, a private joke, a small opening in the day. These scenes gather force because the book knows how much courage can live inside ordinary attention.

The setting is rendered with equal confidence. Hawaii here is not postcard scenery. It is gorgeous, humid, changeable, and charged with social pressure. Beaches, apartments, roads, and military spaces all carry different temperatures of risk. Ferejohn also writes bodies well: exhaustion, surf, cigarette smoke, stale rooms, and the nervous alertness of people who cannot fully relax. She keeps the atmosphere tactile without letting it swamp the characters, which is harder than it looks in a historical novel so dependent on mood.

There are moments when the pacing softens, especially in some secondary social scenes, but the larger design holds. By the time the novel reaches its closing stretch, Ferejohn has earned its mix of sorrow, relief, and possibility. The ending does not promise easy repair, which makes its hope feel sturdier. Crossings is a humane and finely controlled novel about friendship, self-knowledge, and the perilous work of choosing a life that can finally be called one’s own.