Module 8: The Face on the Milk Carton

Summary

This mystery is about a 15-year old girl named Janie Johnson who notices a picture on a milk carton of a missing girl wearing the same dress she vaguely remembers wearing. Janie cannot imagine how she would have been kidnapped from a New Jersey mall when her parents are the kindest, most loving ever. Janie investigates the mystery and finds the dress pictured on the milk carton hidden in her attic. She finds out who she really is—Jennie Spring—the girl stolen from a New Jersey mall. Janie has flashbacks she calls “daymares” and can’t move forward with her life. Her parents finally tell her she is their granddaughter—the daughter of their estranged daughter who ran away to join a cult. Her parents said they had to take a new identity so their daughter could not contact them. They wanted to give Janie a normal life without interference from the cult. Janie gets her next-door neighbor and new boyfriend to drive her to New Jersey where they find the house of the family from the milk carton. She sees that the kids and mother all have red curly hair like she does and realizes this is her biological family. Janie writes her biological family a letter to help her cope but does not intend to send. She loses the letter and ends up telling her parents the letter may have been mailed. The book ends as a cliffhanger as the biological family is called.

Reference

Cooney, C. B. (1990). The face on the milk carton. New York, NY: Random House.

My Impressions

This mystery’s plot held my interest and I could not put it down. It fits all the characteristics of a mystery—there is a crime that has been committed against the main character, there is a puzzle for her to solve, there are suspects, and there are clues presented as the plot develops. This book did not meet the characteristic of having a resolution because it is the first in a series of five books and the reader is left hanging. Some order is about to be restored, although it remains to be seen if justice is served. The reader is definitely immersed in the plot as the story unfolds. This book is not a typical mystery because Janie is her own investigator into her own life’s past. This book is unusual in that the truth of the mystery is not apparent at the end. This sometimes occurs in other genres but is unusual in a mystery.  The reader does learn that Janie was kidnapped. The reader needs to figure out for sure why and by whom by continuing to read the books in the series.

Professional Review

In a novel that never quite lives up to its gripping premise, a high-school student discovers that her much-loved parents may in fact be her kidnappers. After Jane Johnson sees what seems to be her own face as a three-year-old displayed on a school lunch carton, she is plunged into a series of flashbacks: memories of long-forgotten childhood experiences that reinforce her sudden suspicion that she may have been kidnapped. As the underpinnings of her secure world slip, she clings to Reeve, the boy next door, with whom she is falling in love. Her parents' explanation (they are her grandparents; her mother abandoned Jane to return to a cult) proves unsatisfactory, pushing Jane toward emotional collapse until--with the help of Reeve and his sister--she finds a way to face the situation rationally. Cooney's original plot and satisfying resolution are marred by Jane's interminably overwrought analysis of her condition, and by a love interest that is more tacked on than intrinsic. Nevertheless, a real page-turner.

The face on the milk carton [Review of the book The face on the milk carton]. (2012, June 13). Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/caroline-b-cooney/face-on-milk-carton/

Library Uses

This book (with the four subsequent books in the Janie Johnson series by Caroline Cooney) could be used in a library display with quotes printed and glued on the side of empty milk cartons that have been rinsed out and displayed in the library during a Mystery Week—possibly in October.