Jane, the Fox & Me by Fanny Britt (review)

Combining picture-book size and style with graphic-novel narrative sensibility, this elegant Canadian import chronicles the experiences of Hélène, a sensitive junior-high outcast shunned and bullied by girls who were once her friends. She takes refuge in her reading of Jane Eyre, hoping that she, like Jane, can emerge out of difficult circumstances into a slender, wise woman whom people admire. For now, though, the mean girls tease her for being fat, a judgment that is belied by both the illustrations as well as by her doctor in the end, but one that she takes to heart as she looks in the mirror and tries on bathing suits for the class camping trip. The camping trip lives up to all of her fears at first, as she bunks with the other social outcasts and gets tormented by the mean girls, but two nice things do happen: she has a transformative encounter with a fox, and a new girl named Géraldine rejects the mean girls and becomes her friend. Hélène’s emotional tangle is given poignant expression through Arsenault’s pitch-perfect mixed-media art; thin pencil-lined figures picked out against smudgy neutral grays and muted sepia tones highlight both the sharp-edged sources and limned echoes of Hélène’s everyday sadness, while the depictions of her imagined scenes from Jane Eyre are cleaner and more colorful, bringing in reds and greens, and even on occasion exploding into luminous watercolor landscapes. The contrast is striking and sets up the almost mystical tone of the encounter with the fox, who stands out in the red previously reserved for Hélène’s imaginary connection with Jane. The gradual emergence, accompanied by a progressively friendlier font style, into the full-color bloom of the final spread, assures readers that Hélène’s inner and outer worlds have been reconciled into a happier and more hopeful place. Hélène’s story is sweetly comforting and compelling on its own merits, and, as with Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (BCCB 1/08), the form in which it is presented also has value for those interested in analyzing and understanding the full aesthetic potential of the graphic-novel format in storytelling.