Crossings

Laurel Ferejohn wastes no time telling the reader what kind of danger rules Crossings. The novel opens with Tomby, a young Marine stationed in Hawaii in 1968, nearly drowned by his own peers during a beach outing that should read as harmless downtime. Instead, it becomes a blunt lesson in the cost of being seen as different in a hypermasculine world built on cruelty, rank, and performance.

Tomby is hiding more than fear. He is a gay man trying to survive military life just as Vietnam looms closer, and Ferejohn gives that pressure a constant physical force. The book keeps tightening around him. Barracks life feels watched, language feels weaponized, and even a swim in the ocean can turn punitive. What gives the novel its emotional depth, though, is the friendship that grows between Tomby and Valetta, the young wife of one of his fellow Marines. She is trapped in a bad marriage of her own, isolated, underread by the people around her, and increasingly aware that safety and obedience are not the same thing.

Ferejohn is especially strong at showing how intimacy forms in fragments. A talk, a ride, a shared look, a small act of trust. Tomby and Valetta do not become important to each other through grand declarations. They arrive there by recognizing the loneliness in one another and refusing to look away. The result is a novel that understands friendship as rescue, not in a sentimental sense, but in the practical sense of helping another person remain legible to himself.

The Hawaii setting matters here. Ferejohn writes the island with heat, glare, dampness, roadside motion, and an undercurrent of instability. Beauty never cancels threat. That tension keeps the novel alert. So does the prose, which is clean, observant, and patient with silence. Even when the book stretches into backstory or lingers with side characters, it keeps building toward the question at its center: what does it take to cross from the life assigned to you into one you can actually live?

If Crossings has a weakness, it is only that some domestic scenes run longer than they need to before the next turn of danger arrives. Still, Ferejohn more than earns the novel’s final movement, which lands with both relief and ache. Crossings is a thoughtful, deeply felt novel about repression, chosen loyalty, and the terrifying grace of finally moving toward freedom.