Breakaway Books

Authored by Megan Giddings; Published June 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

Meet Me at the Crossroads juxtaposes a fantastical premise with down-to-earth loss in a way that makes the novel impossible to put down. I just had to know just how the heroine would choose to come to terms with the tragic events that plagued her life.

In Meet Me at the Crossroads, twins Ayanna and Olivia are split up when their parents get divorced, Olivia to live with their Catholic mother and Ayanna with their father, who is a strict adherent of a religion dedicated to understanding doors that have mysteriously appeared around the earth. The doors sometimes kill those who pass through them, but have often allowed the travelers to experience life in a new dimension that no one understands. On Ayanna’s seventeenth birthday, she is finally permitted to walk through the door, and Olivia chases her through–but only Ayanna makes it back. Ayanna must learn to cope with the loss of her sister and the person she was before.

I love the fact that, throughout this entire novel, we never discover the truth behind the doors. More than that, we don’t even discover a pattern to where they open to, when they open, or why they disappear for such long periods of time. The mystery of the doors changes Ayanna’s life forever, but it is never resolved, and Ayanna must learn to live with it. Some people worship the doors; others try to make money off of them; the government guards them and classifies information about them; intrepid explorers manage to extract recreational drugs from trips through them. All of it feels like how we would actually respond to such a thing as a society, and it is thought-provoking to witness.

It is much harder to observe Ayanna’s grief. Understandably, the grief and the trauma leads to severe depression, the urge to self-harm, and disordered eating. She is, quite simply, struggling to survive–without any help from her parents, who appear to be drowning in their own grief. Ayanna goes to college, finds friends who become family, but still the weight of the guilt she feels keeps threatening to bring her down. The realism of the grief, though painful, makes the book far more powerful. After going through the door, Ayanna gains the ability to see spirits and even hear them, but Olivia never visits her. She torments herself with the thought that her sister’s spirit is out there, blaming Ayanna for what happened. There is no magical moment where she recovers from her grief–a temptation I worried the author might give in to–just a slow trudge toward accepting it as part of her life and realizing that life can still be beautiful and worth living.

Meet Me at the Crossroads made me think but more than that, it made me use my imagination. It you want to exercise those mental muscles, pick this one up.