A graphic novel about bullying, body image and the transformative power of fiction. Helene has been inexplicably ostracized by the girls who were once her friends. Her school life is full of whispers and lies -- Helene weighs 216; she smells like BO. Her loving mother is too tired to be any help. Fortunately, Helene has one consolation, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Helene identifies strongly with Jane's tribulations, and when she is lost in the pages of this wonderful book, she is able to ignore her tormentors. But when Helene is humiliated on a class trip in front of her entire grade, she needs more than a fictional character to see herself as a person deserving of laughter and friendship. Leaving the outcasts' tent one night, Helene encounters a fox, a beautiful creature with whom she shares a moment of connection. But when Suzanne Lipsky frightens the fox away, insisting that it must be rabid, Helene's despair becomes even more pronounced: now she believes that only a diseased and
