Review: "What Janie Found" by Caroline B. Cooney

What Janie Found by Caroline B. Cooney
Published 2000
★★★

The conclusion of the series—well, it was, until someone decided it would be a good idea to revive this series and upend everything we knew about the characters in books 1–4. But we're pretending that book 5 doesn't exist, so...the end of the series.

In What Janie Found, Janie finds some information that could put her face-to-face with her kidnapper. And because Janie is a teenager and impulsive and not great at making plans, she decides that the thing to do is make that happen—to visit her brother in Colorado and, hopefully, get some answers to the questions she still has. (Spoiler alert: Janie doesn't actually have much by way of questions. She wants to know what happened, sure, but the guesswork that has been done over the previous books basically answers that.)

This is the series book that I read the fewest times as a kid—once or twice—and my strongest memory is of the red cowboy boots Janie ends up with. I'd forgotten quite a lot about the book, which was nice (felt a little more like a new read than the previous books of the series), including just how dreadful Steven's girlfriend is. (Maybe worth noting that Steven is willing to break ties with someone who is a little too interested in his family history, while Reeve's much bigger betrayal is still reverberating and everyone is still actively trying to forgive him...though to be fair, Janie has a much, much greater history with Reeve than Steven does with Kathleen, and everyone else wants Reeve to be redeemable as well.)

Janie's not the brightest bulb in the box in this book. A lot of her decisions about Hannah, and trying to find Hannah, are suspect. What staggered me, though, is that she willingly leaves her (adoptive) father in hospital to go on this adventure even though it's not clear whether he'll live or die. This is a man she loves dearly, even if their relationship has gotten more complicated by the revelations of the past few books, and as an adult...I can't imagine willingly putting myself that far away from a parent whose survival was so uncertain. It's just...you can imagine a version of the story in which her father dies while she's chasing ghosts, can't you? And where she has to reckon with the fact that she was chasing those ghosts instead of being there at the end.

Ah well. At any rate, a satisfying enough conclusion to the series. Off I go to find the next childhood reread...