That only one of these relationships fully resolves reflects the satisfying emotional complexity of “Stepping Stones.” (From the start, the reader is tipped off to how problematic he will be, when he insists on referring to Jen as Jenny a special circle of hell is reserved for adults who call children by nicknames not of their preference.) On weekends, his two daughters visit, one of whom, a girl about Jen’s age, is as supercilious as her father. Jen and her mother live on the farm with her mother’s new boyfriend, a legitimately annoying figure who is highhanded and especially hard on Jen.
We see a flashback in the form of a happy cartoon: She and her parents are all shouting their names into the recording of their outgoing message, a family unit announcing itself as such. On one particularly tough day, she calls her father, who never visits the farm, only to get his answering machine. In a book billed as fiction, she’s able to lay bare the pain of a child experiencing her parents’ divorce: The novel’s heroine, Jen, a talented doodler and comic book fan, doesn’t have to narrate her moments of anguish we see them in her drawings. Knisley’s books for adults - such as “ Relish,” about her lifelong love of food, and “ Something New,” about the twisty-turny run-up to her marriage - are introspective but mostly free of true tension. Like Knisley’s illustrated memoirs, her first graphic novel for kids is autobiographical, which means it includes the messy, sometimes harsh realities that characterize the actual lives of children. At a moment when the world is craving, en masse, a return to a simpler time, “Stepping Stones” is especially seductive, but its appeal is perennial children (and their parents) will return to it again and again, savoring the visual details that initially go unnoticed, reliving the wit and wonder. It may be predictable, but the rural transplant premise still provides delight and relief, especially as rendered by Knisley, a comic artist with a creative spirit as fresh as the farm. After skimming only a few pages of Lucy Knisley’s STEPPING STONES (Random House Graphic, 224 pp., $20.99 ages 8 to 12), even the least jaded of readers might guess the story’s arc: A mother moves her daughter, a true city kid, to the country, where the child will be surprised to find, over time, that she thrives on the pleasures of hard work, fresh milk and the natural world.
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