Review: "The Voice on the Radio" by Caroline B. Cooney

The Voice on the Radio by Caroline B. Cooney
Published 1996
★★★

Ah, yes. Book 3, in which Reeve proves that he is slime. In the earlier installments of this series, Janie discovered that she had been kidnapped as a child, went to live with her biological family, went back to her adoptive family...and now is navigating a long-distance relationship with Reeve, who has against all odds made it to college. The trouble is, the thing that interests Reeve most is the college radio station—and when he can't think of anything to say on air, he takes the juiciest story he can think of: Janie's. And he spills it to the world. Without changing a single name or detail.

Here's the thing: Reeve messes up here, big time. More than, I think, a 'good guy' of a contemporary YA book would be allowed to—this is such a staggering violation of Janie's trust and privacy that it's sort of hard to fathom. Even when listeners rave to Reeve about how well he's described things, how they'd recognize Janie if they saw her on the street (Janie's defining physical feature is her hair, which every single book of the series obsesses over), Reeve doesn't stop; when shit hits the fan, he decides that he'll have to drop out of college to stop himself from continuing to share all the intimate details that Janie and her family trusted him with.

So Reeve is scum. And in a contemporary book, I think he'd probably be the Wrong Guy of the book, the Boy Next Door Gone Bad, and there'd be another boy waiting bashfully in the wings to sweep in and make Janie see that there was someone else all along. But...in this series, he manages to stay in the picture, and even as I think Reeve is scum...I also think that's one of the most realistic things about the series. Because: teenagers do stupid things. (Adults do stupid things too.) And sometimes that's a reason to cut ties—and sometimes people do, and sometimes people don't, and the fact that Janie still loves Reeve, can't separate this awful thing he's done from pretty much every previous memory of him, makes their relationship so much more complex.

This is also the book in which we start to see a bit more of one of Janie's brothers, who were relegated to side characters in book 2. Everyone's growing up a bit, I guess. Except Reeve. Not my favorite of the books, but messy in an interesting way.