The Face on the Milk Carton Reading Banned Reasoning

'The Confront on the Milk Carton' Grows Up

In 1990,The Face on the Milk Carton was published by Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, introducing 15-year-onetime Janie Johnson to the world. This month, the final installment in the v-book series, Janie Confront to Face, was released.

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In 1990, The Face on the Milk Carton was published by Runted Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers (that's an early version of the book cover at right; the spookier update is higher up). The novel features notable redheaded graphic symbol Janie Johnson, an otherwise happy, normal 15-twelvemonth-old who during lunch in the school deli one day sees what she believes is her own childhood face on a milk carton. Thus begins her utterly compelling psychological, emotional, and occasionally geographical journey — with the help of trusty next-door neighbour and dear interest Reeve Shields — to figure out who she really is, and what happened.

In the more than than twenty years that followed that first volume, there have been sequels — Whatever Happened to Janie? ('93), The Vocalization on the Radio ('96), and What Janie Found (2000). The serial has sold more than 4.2 million copies altogether. The most recent novel isJanie Face to Face, in which author Caroline B. Cooney concludes the serial and reveals what happens to Janie and Reeve equally grownups, and whether Janie's kidnapper, Hannah, ever gets her due. Writing the followups, though, was never role of the initial program, Cooney told me. The outset book "was meant to be a standalone," she said. "I was never going to write a 2nd, never going to write a tertiary, and the fourth, I knew it was the terminal volume — they even put that on the cover! But my editor called me up [after number 4] and said, 'I still think nigh Janie, and I remember almost who she and Reeve and their families would be every bit adults. Why don't you lot exercise that?'"

Cooney, who's authored some 90 books for young readers, primarily suspense, doesn't normally write well-nigh adults, but she took up the challenge. "These kids were very close to me, and I had the advantage of knowing what my readers wanted," she said. "From the beginning, they've written, 'Exercise Reeve and Janie get married?' And they're so bellyaching, they want the kidnapper to become hers. The story is really virtually how you cope and do the right thing, but I knew if I wrote the developed story, I'd have to deal with those other two things." Original fans of the Janie serial will likely not want to miss the chance to hang out with those familiar characters again, peek into their continuing romance, and run into what happens to Hannah. (Hint: A key plot point in the latest novel hinges non on milk cartons, just on Facebook.)

That an intended-to-be-1-off book published in 1990 could have such a long life, standing to resonate with those original readers and new ones and so many years later, is acceptance to the deep question it addresses. Cooney, who's now at work on a historical novel about the children who sail on the Mayflower, told me she never anticipated how popular the book would exist, simply she was aware from the kickoff that her plot idea was something special. "The all-time question in a volume is 'Who am I?'" she explains.

Indeed, that question had a lot of us under its spell from the offset. Who was Janie? If Janiewas that 3-twelvemonth-one-time with the pigtails on the front of a carton of milk, kidnapped from a shopping mall in New Jersey and named Jennie Jump, why does she alive in Connecticut with the name Janie and parents who aren't her own? Did her dearest mom and dad kidnap her? And what can and should she do almost the New Jersey parents who are, it seems, still looking for her?

And from that: Who were nosotros?Even amongst those who adored their perfect families (coughing), who didn't remember, occasionally, what information technology might have meant to have been born into some other i? Who, in the aftermath of a vicious teenage fight with i's mom, perhaps even a grounding, didn't wish she could plough her parents in for some other gear up? On the other hand, and on a more existential level, many of us live with a continual, dull background fear that something we've always assumed to be truthful about ourselves may turn out to be fake. The disability to truly know oneself — the truth nearly one's health, one'south parents, 1'due south relationships, even one's innermost thoughts or hidden — is not something reserved every bit a worry for teens. Anybody wonders, what if? What if something was revealed that unalterably inverse the lives we've lived up to this time? That's what happens to Janie.

So it'due south some serious stuff that Cooney is confronting when redheaded Janie Johnson gazes at her younger cocky on a carton of milk (that she'due south not fifty-fifty supposed to be drinking, having simply found out she's lactose intolerant and been forbidden not only milk only also ice cream). Those of us of a certain historic period devoured this book, reading it not just once, but many times. ESPN magazine editor Megan Greenwell tweeted to me, "I fixated on it to an unhealthy caste," while Riverhead's Lydia Hirt tweeted, "I probably read information technology 5x. Even so remember Janie'due south redhead fam." Ane reader credited information technology with generating her fear of kidnapping by cult; another said, "It made me irrationally concerned that I  had been kidnapped because my parents were and then squeamish." This book got into us; it made us retrieve, and keep thinking about it, even after we finished reading.

For many of united states, too, information technology was the beginning to a lifelong beloved of reading, particularly in the genres of suspense and horror. Caitlin Moore, picture show editorat Austinist.com, told me, "This book was all the rage at my Montessori school in the early '90s. My friends and I passed it around and discussed information technology endlessly (every girl loves a skilful adoption fantasy), and as I recall it sparked a Y.A. mystery trend that led u.s. to darker material similar Christopher Pike, 5.C. Andrews, and somewhen Stephen King (you lot know, stuff that worried our parents). I think the idea of finding out your whole life has been based on a lie is very intriguing to young girls."

Greenwell,who was in fourth grade when she read the first book, agreed that the deeper question at the heart of the volume was what made it speak to and so many of us. "I think The Face on the Milk Carton tapped into some primal 'what if' sense in me, though I wouldn't have described it equally such at the fourth dimension. It definitely fabricated me wonder if I was secretly not my parents' child based on no prove whatsoever." Plus, who didn't sort of covet Janie'southward life drama in the humdrum everyday of school and play and home? "While I understood on some level that this must be sort of a traumatic matter for poor fictional Janie, I also envied the excitement of her life," she said.

In fast-forwarding us to current twenty-four hour period on Janie and Reeve, Cooney works in new technology — Facebook, for example, and jail cell phones (Janie adores hers). While the chronology may not work exactly if you requite information technology too much thought — it's 20 years after the first book for us, only merely several years later for the characters in the serial — the inclusion of the social media site makes for an admirable leap ahead to update the series. In many ways, Facebook does fit the bill asthe new "milk carton" of our fourth dimension. Cooney, aware of the difficulties of coping with technological innovation in a series of novels released over a twenty-year period, said, "You can't become back and technologically update the start books, they stand. But the last book, it had to have this. I thought, my readers are smart. They'll figure it out."

Of grade, the inception for the original idea was less tech, more bricks and mortar: "I was at La Guardia airport, long prior to the changes of 9/eleven," Cooney told me, and "the concourse was plastered with homemade missing child posters. 1 picture showed a very small child, two or three years old, and she'd been missing for 15 years. I just wept for those parents thinking their daughter might still be found — no one could recognize her — and and so I thought, what if the girl recognized herself? What a chilling idea!"

It was. Greenwell says, "At the climactic moments—her finding the stuff in the attic, the beginning time she and her boyfriend see her biological family unit with their scarlet hair, the phone conversation at the terminate—I FELT her anxiety, or was convinced I did." In some ways, Janie was just like us ... and all the same, the situation she found herself in was nothing we could accept imagined, until we read it. "Having one foot notwithstanding in fantasy state combined with pre-teen angst makes imagining an alternate reality (dissimilar friends, house, wearing apparel, parents) super compelling," says Moore. And it was empowering, too: "At an age when we couldn't brand very many decisions on our own, reading about girls who have to brand such huge dramatic choices was scintillating and great."

Cooney considers the characters in the series some of her favorites in her lengthy writing career. "I truly loved them more," she told me. At that place is something she'd modify, though, if she'd known how many books in the serial would ultimately exist. "I would definitely take named her Janie," she says, "only I wouldn't have it rhyme with Jodie, and I wouldn't take twins named Brendan and Brian. Who can continue them direct?"

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/01/face-milk-carton-grows/319307/