Review: "The Face on the Milk Carton" by Caroline B. Cooney

The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney
Published 1990
★★★

Was anyone else obsessed with this series as a kid...? I read books 1 and 2 numerous times, book 3 at least a couple of times, and book 4...probably only once, actually. (And then book 5 came around and was so wildly inconsistent with the rest of the series that I'm pretending it doesn't exist for this reread. Probably. I'm not very good at sticking to 'I do not need to read this' resolutions, so...)

Anyway, 1990 kicked off this series about Janie Johnson, a high school student with for all intents and purposes a perfect life—until she picks up a milk carton and sees that the missing child printed on it is none other than herself. (The cover is a bad representation of this, because Janie's single defining feature is her masses of red hair—I'm surprised to see how few of the various covers of the book take note of that hair.) And this new knowledge turns her life upside down, because if she's not actually Janie Johnson but Jennie Spring, then...who are the parents she grew up with? Are they her kidnappers? And what does she do with this information?

YA of the 90s was so different than it is today—today, Janie would have a side plot about her dream to be a photographer or a fashion designer or a writer; she'd have creative ambitions and an interest in travel and probably be a lot wittier. But I kind of love that in the 90s, she's just, like...interested in weddings and clothing and doing the minimum required to get by. She's nice enough but rather spoiled and not that deep and doesn't really...mind. I read so many of Cooney's books as a kid (literally, all of them that I could get my hands on—planning to reread the Time Travelers series next), and despite the sometimes-grim content, this series still leaves me with a feel-good sense and an obsession with some of the details. Janie's red cowboy boots from book 4? Yes please.