1990s Nostalgia: The Face on the Milk Carton

There are some books that stay with you practically forever.

Another memorable book from my youth is The Face on the Milk Carton.  Like Judy Blume, Caroline B. Cooney was an American author who wrote realistic teen fiction. Unlike Blume, Caroline B. Cooney dabbled in a variety of genres and was a regular among the point horror authors in the early 1990s, a line up that included other greats such as RL Stine. She is still actively writing suspense novels for young adults.

Surprising then that during the Point Horror era, she would release the one book that would become her best selling and her most memorable.

The Face on the Milk Carton tells the story of fifteen year old Janie Johnson. Janie is a well adjusted, although slightly spoiled only child of ageing parents Frank and Miranda Johnson. She has never had to want for anything. And then one day, she spots a picture of herself, as a three-year-old on the back of a milk carton. The child on the milk carton is Jennie Spring, lived in a different state and went missing exactly twelve years ago. What follows is a page turning and gut wrenching ride as Janie and her friend Reeve try to investigate what happened. Did Frank and Miranda really kidnap Janie, or are other forces at work? Who is the mysterious woman named Hannah Javenson? Why do Janie's parents have a box of her belongings in the attic? As a fourteen-year-old, I literally lapped up all the drama and kept wanting to know what would happen next.

The novel ends on quite a cliffhanger. The author never intended to write a sequel, but three years later, a second novel What Happened to Janie, which deals with Janie's reunion with her birth family, appeared on the shelves and became just as popular as The Face on the Milk Carton. Together, both books were made into a TV movie titled The Face on the Milk Carton. There were a few differences from the book to movie, for example Brendan and Brian Spring do not appear in the movie and Jodie Spring is significantly younger and a far more sympathetic character, than the prickly Jodie who appeared in the book. According to IMDB the surnames of each family are also different, Jessmon and Sands. In Australia, the film aired one Friday night on Channel 10, shortly after I had read the first book but not the second. Needless to say, the second book was soon checked out from my local library. 

What I was unaware of, until very recently, was that the books about Janie would continue to be released. The Voice on the Radio and What Janie Found continued the series and slowly unravel the mystery of what happened (or may have happened,) to Hannah Javenson. Later, an eBook titled what Janie Saw was also released. The books no longer had the impact of the original or its finely written sequel, sadly.

At the beginning of this year a much longer, and final book in what is now known as the Janie Johnson series, titled Janie Face to Face was released. I'm looking forward to posting my review of this one tomorrow. (I also went through hell trying to find an image of the edition I read in the mid-1990s for this review, but that is another story.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more