Wait a Minute: Is that Me? Caroline B. Cooney's The Face on the Milk Carton
Like, imagine you're a teenaged girl with, like, all the angst and uncertainty that comes with the territory, you know? You have, like, crushes on boys and, like, giggle on the phone 'till all hours of the night with your BFF and, like, can hardly wait the few more weeks until -- OMG! -- you can like get your diver's license, right? Your life is, like, a whirlwind of Spanish assignments and Driver's Ed and homecoming dances... and then one day, you see a picture of a missing child on a milk carton and you know. You just know. That little girl is you. It happened: it happened to Janie Johnson, and once she'd seen The Face on the Milk Carton, her life could never be the same. Janie was living an ordinary life with ordinary parents in suburban Connecticut when she saw the picture of three-year-old Jennie Spring in her polka-dot dress, Jennie who'd disappeared from a New Jersey shopping mall twelve years before. You can understand that picture rocked her world. But instead of finding an adult - a trusted teacher, a doctor, a clergyman - to confide in, Janie chose instead Reeve, the seventeen-year-old next door... after they'd become BF and GF, of course. For months, Janie and Reeve kept the secret from everyone, including parents and Janie's best friends Sarah-Charlotte and Adair. No good parent - and Frank and Miranda Johnson were definitely good parents - could not notice the weight of such stress on their child; and thus the story came out: The Johnsons were in reality Janie's grandparents, parents of her mother Hannah who had disappeared into a cult (the Hare Krishnas, to be precise) at just sixteen. At least that's what they told her... but why did Janie have memories of twin baby brothers, and why was there a toddler-sized polka-dot dress in the Johnson's attic? Uh-oh... Caroline B. Cooney's The Face on the Milk Carton was first published in 1990, about the time that the missing-kid-on-milk-carton movement took off. The intervening twenty-plus years have not been kind, as the book is undeniably dated: what fifteen-year-old girl has a landline in her room instead of staying up all night texting her BFF? Does anyone still go to the library to look at microfilm? On the other hand, some things are timeless: the joy of the freedom that comes with a driver's license, the thrill of locking eyes with that special boy across a crowded cafeteria, the delicious sensation of that first kiss... Cooney's short (129-page) novel is the first of a four-part series that continues with Whatever Happened to Janie?(1993), The Voice In The Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The title of installment II is a clear clue to how The Face in the Milk Carton closes. The book is essentially cut off in mid-stride; creating an unsatisfactorily abrupt ending that leaves nothing resolved. As an adult male (who can barely remember being sixteen, but does remember that sixteen-year-old girls were a complete mystery), I cannot in any way identify with Janie Johnson. I've read enough YA books, however, to find her much less mature than her literary sisters, a lack that figures powerfully in her mishandling of her suspicion that she is the missing Jennie. Cooney blew a chance to remind teens and tweens that they should talk to a trustworthy adult when they have a problem they can't discuss with their parents. The seventeen-year-old next door just doesn't cut it. Janie's dithering and stress might have been greatly reduced if she'd just talked to her guidance counselor... The Face on the Milk Carton is a banned book, and this week - September 24 to October 1, 2011, is the official Banned Book Week of the American Library Association. This review was submitted to the annual Banned Books Writeoff at the now-defunct website epinions.com, hosted by Books Lead Pestyside. I read banned books: do you? Even in 129 short pages, Caroline Cooney manages to push plenty of buttons for wannabe book banners; some of whom apparently don't read well. For instance, it's clearly stated in the text that Janie and Reeve never had sex, but that inconvenient fact didn't save the book from being one of the most widely-challenged books of its decade for "sexual content." The book is often challenged on the basis of sexual situations - apparently, the challengers read the part where Reeve and Janie check into a motel, but skipped over the part where they leave without opening the motel room door. It's challenged on the basis of "challenge to authority" as well - I don't get that one at all; unless people don't like it that Janie finds Reeve's older sister (a law student, not a lawyer) overbearing - which she is. Some of the more foolish challengers would ban Cooney's text for discussing "cults" - never mind that the novel paints a perhaps undeservedly dreadful image of the Hare Krishna movement, somehow conflating it with the more unsavory stories of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Where some see "objectionable" material, I see a somewhat saccharine - and certainly dated - YA novel about a young girl desperately trying to convince herself, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that she is exactly who her parents say she is. Janie Johnson seems to me to be a pretty typical teenage girl (ca. 1990) - it's not her fault that she was written as a ditz |
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