“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality,” Nora Ephron wrote. “If I can’t stand the world I just curl up with a book, and it’s like a little spaceship that takes me away from everything,” Susan Sontag told an interviewer, articulating an experience at once so common and so deeply personal to all of us who have ever taken refuge from the world in the pages of a book and the words of a beloved author. It’s precisely this experience that comes vibrantly alive in Jane, the Fox, and Me (public library) — a stunningly illustrated graphic novel about a young girl named Hélène, who, cruelly teased by the “mean girls” clique at school, finds refuge in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In Jane, she sees both a kindred spirit and aspirational substance of character, one straddling the boundary between vulnerability and strength with remarkable grace — just the quality of heart and mind she needs as she confronts the common and heartbreaking trials of teenage girls tormented by bullying, by concerns over their emerging womanly shape, and by the soul-shattering feeling of longing for acceptance yet receiving none.

Written by Fanny Britt and illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault — who also gave us the magnificent Virginia Wolf, one of the best children’s books of 2012 — this masterpiece of storytelling is as emotionally honest and psychologically insightful as it is graphically stunning. What makes the visual narrative especially enchanting is that Hélène’s black-and-white world of daily sorrow springs to life in full color whenever she escapes with Brönte.

When Hélène reluctantly goes on a class trip, she finds herself humiliated in front of everyone. As she resigns herself to the outcasts’ tent, her fictional friend no longer provides sufficient consolation and assurance that she’s worthy of friendship.

Just then, a small red fox appears before the tent — a tender creature whose gaze gives Hélène a momentary glimpse of that soul-to-soul connection she so desires.

But it only lasts a moment — one of the mean girls scares the fox away, claiming it is rabid and leaving Hélène to believe that there must be something diseased and defective about anyone who seeks to connect with her.

But as the class returns to school, a new girl joins the outcast group, unconcerned with the circle’s social standing. Géraldine is simply content to be surrounded by people she likes who like her back, people with whom she shares that simple yet profound being-to-being connection that Hélène had found in the fox’s eyes. And, just like that, Hélène comes to see that the only way to un-believe all the hurtful things others say about her is to simply stop worrying about it all — and to believe that the deep sense of acceptance and inner peace she found in Jane Eyre and the fox springs from her own soul.

Jane, the Fox, and Me is an absolute treasure that blends the realities of children’s capacity to be cruel, the possibilities of transcending our own psychological traps, and literature’s power to nourish, comfort, and transform.