Megan Giddings has crafted something extraordinary in Meet Me at the Crossroads—a novel that dances between the speculative and the deeply human, where seven mysterious doors serve not merely as portals to another world, but as mirrors reflecting our most fundamental desires and fears. This is a story that understands grief as both destroyer and creator, examining how loss reshapes not just our understanding of love, but our very perception of reality itself.
The premise is deceptively simple: seven doors appear across the world, leading to what appears to be paradise. Yet Giddings knows that paradise is always conditional, always dangerous. When identical twins Ayanna and Olivia—two Black teenagers from the Midwest—encounter one such door in their rural soybean fields, the narrative becomes a meditation on the spaces between worlds, between sisters, between faith and doubt.
The Architecture of Sisterhood
What distinguishes this novel from other speculative fiction exploring interdimensional travel is Giddings’ unwavering focus on the relationship between Ayanna and Olivia. These are not interchangeable twins but fully realized individuals whose similarities only highlight their fundamental differences. Ayanna, raised in the Church of the Blue Doors (later called Pathsong), approaches the mysterious portals with the reverence of someone whose faith has always included room for the impossible. Olivia, more conventionally religious and deeply cautious, embodies the kind of grounded skepticism that keeps us tethered to familiar ground.
Giddings writes their dynamic with remarkable nuance, avoiding the trap of making one sister “the believer” and the other “the skeptic.” Instead, both girls carry complex relationships with faith, with mystery, and with each other. Their conversations crackle with the kind of affection and tension that only exists between people who love each other completely while remaining fundamentally unknowable to one another.
The author’s background shines through in these intimate moments—having established herself with Lakewood and The Women Could Fly, Giddings demonstrates a masterful understanding of how to ground fantastical elements in deeply recognizable human emotions. The sisters’ midnight conversations, their shared love of soccer and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, their different approaches to their mother’s expectations—these details create a foundation so solid that when the supernatural intrudes, it feels not jarring but inevitable.
Through the Looking Glass
When the sisters finally cross through their door—Ayanna first, then Olivia chasing after her in a moment of pure protective instinct—the novel transforms into something even more haunting. The otherworld Giddings creates is neither utopia nor dystopia but something more unsettling: a place that seems to respond to the deepest needs and fears of those who enter it.
The meadows with their perpetual blue sky and golden paths become a landscape of memory and longing. Here, among the long navy grass and floating lights, the dead speak and wander in eternal procession toward silver mountains. Giddings’ description of this realm reads like a fever dream painted in shades of blue—beautiful and terrible in equal measure.
But it’s in the aftermath of this crossing that the novel truly finds its voice. When Ayanna returns alone, clutching only scraps of her sister’s dress, the story becomes a profound exploration of survivor’s guilt, complicated grief, and the way trauma reshapes our relationship with the world around us.
The Burden of Sight
The novel’s second act follows Ayanna through college, where she struggles with depression, forms new relationships, and grapples with an unwanted gift: the ability to see and communicate with spirits. This development could have felt gimmicky in less capable hands, but Giddings treats Ayanna’s newfound sight as both blessing and curse, a constant reminder of loss that cannot be ignored or compartmentalized.
The relationships Ayanna forms—particularly with Jane, her fierce and emotionally unavailable best friend, and Felix, a gentle creative writing student carrying his own trauma—feel authentic and lived-in. These connections serve as lifelines for someone drowning in grief, but they also highlight the isolation that comes with carrying knowledge others cannot accept or understand.
Giddings excels at writing the small moments that define relationships: Jane’s provocative t-shirts that spell out “I EAT WHAT I F*CK,” Felix’s black nail polish and tender way of helping Ayanna untangle leaves from her hair, the way friends circle around pain without always knowing how to name it. These details accumulate into a portrait of young adulthood that feels both specific and universal.
Faith at the Margins
One of the greatest strengths of “Meet Me at the Crossroads” is its treatment of faith as something complex and evolving rather than fixed and dogmatic. Ayanna’s upbringing in Pathsong—a religion built around curiosity, wonder, and the acceptance of uncertainty—provides a framework for understanding the inexplicable without demanding simple answers.
The church’s tenets—service, curiosity, kindness, wonder, observation, listening, and courage—read like a manifesto for how to live thoughtfully in an uncertain world. When Ayanna encounters faith healers, academic researchers, and others trying to understand or exploit the doors’ power, her grounding in this tradition allows her to navigate between credulous acceptance and cynical dismissal.
Giddings weaves throughout the narrative a mythology that spans from dinosaur times to the present, suggesting the doors have always been with us, appearing at moments of transition and transformation. This deep history gives weight to the present-day events while avoiding the trap of making the sisters’ experience feel uniquely chosen or special.
The Price of Knowledge
As Ayanna becomes involved with Professor Collins’ research into the doors and their aftermath, the novel examines the ethics of studying tragedy and the way institutions can exploit personal trauma for academic or financial gain. The presence of wealthy donors seeking to monetize resurrection adds a layer of social critique that feels particularly relevant to our current moment.
The research scenes—with their Ouija boards, spirit communication attempts, and careful documentation of supernatural phenomena—walk a careful line between taking the supernatural seriously and acknowledging the human tendency to find patterns where none exist. Giddings neither dismisses Ayanna’s experiences as hallucination nor presents them as unquestionable truth, instead allowing them to exist in the ambiguous space where grief and transcendence meet.
Love as Penance
The novel’s final movement brings all its themes together in a meditation on love as both gift and burden. When the doors begin appearing again, Ayanna faces an impossible choice: safety in the known world or the terrible possibility of reunion with her sister. Her decision to return, despite the protests of those who love her, feels both heartbreaking and inevitable.
The ending, with its promise that “love, with all its intertwined loss, was her penance,” offers no easy resolution but something more valuable: an acceptance that love requires us to remain open to pain, to continue choosing connection despite the certainty of loss.
Literary Inheritance
Meet Me at the Crossroads stands as a worthy successor to Giddings’ previous works while marking new territory in contemporary speculative fiction. Like Lakewood, it examines the particular ways that Black women navigate systems designed to exploit them. Like The Women Could Fly, it uses fantastical elements to illuminate very real social and personal struggles.
The novel’s influences feel wide-ranging—from Octavia Butler’s explorations of transformation and survival to Toni Morrison’s ability to make the supernatural feel both otherworldly and deeply rooted in specific cultural contexts. Yet Giddings’ voice remains distinctly her own, marked by a combination of intellectual rigor and emotional generosity that makes even the most challenging material accessible.
Minor Turbulence
While “Meet Me at the Crossroads” succeeds admirably in most of its ambitions, there are moments where the pacing falters slightly. The middle section, following Ayanna through her college years, occasionally feels less urgent than the sections dealing directly with the doors and their aftermath. Some of the academic research scenes, while thematically important, slow the narrative momentum.
Additionally, while the mythology surrounding the doors is richly imagined, there are moments where the exposition feels slightly heavy-handed, pulling readers out of the immediate emotional experience. The novel works best when it trusts readers to understand the supernatural elements through character experience rather than explanation.
Recommended Reading
Readers drawn to Meet Me at the Crossroads should consider:
- The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin – for its blend of family drama and world-changing events
- The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell – though nonfiction, for its examination of environmental change and human adaptation
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel – for its meditation on art, connection, and survival
- The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin – for its complex treatment of power, family, and transformation
- Kindred by Octavia Butler – for its unflinching examination of history and identity
- Beloved by Toni Morrison – for its treatment of trauma, memory, and the supernatural
Final Verdict
Meet Me at the Crossroads is that rare novel that manages to be both deeply personal and expansively imaginative, grounding its supernatural elements in emotions so recognizable they feel like shared memories. Giddings has created a work that honors the complexity of grief while suggesting that love—even love shadowed by loss—remains our most powerful tool for understanding both ourselves and the mystery of existence.
This is a novel that will stay with readers long after the final page, not because it provides easy answers but because it asks the right questions: How do we love in the face of inevitable loss? What do we owe the dead? How do we distinguish between vision and hallucination, between faith and desperation? In asking these questions with such grace and intelligence, Giddings has created something genuinely special—a novel that expands our understanding of what speculative fiction can accomplish when it refuses to choose between wonder and truth.
Meet Me at the Crossroads earns its place among the year’s most accomplished works of literary speculative fiction, offering readers both the pleasure of a compelling story and the deeper satisfaction of encountering a mind genuinely wrestling with the fundamental questions of human experience. In a literary landscape often divided between genre entertainment and literary prestige, Meet Me at the Crossroads stands as proof that the best fiction transcends such boundaries entirely.
