Published 1993
★★★
Book 2! In The Face on the Milk Carton, Janie Johnson discovered that she was actually Jennie Spring...and in Whatever Happened to Janie?, she's forced to reckon with the truth of her identity when she is sent to live with her biological family.
This was the book of the series that most fascinated me as a kid, I think partly because I also had Twice Taken, in which Brooke discovers that she's actually Amy—the victim of a parental abduction—and is sent to live with her biological mother. (Oh gosh, I'm going to have to reread that now too. I loved that book.) That's a single book rather than a series, and plotwise it has the most similarities to this book, with the girls living with the parents they were taken from and having to wrestle with complex and messy feelings and new lives that they neither asked for nor particularly want. Twice Taken always struck me as markedly more realistic, for a number of reasons, but I was also fascinated by just...the physical differences between Janie's life as a Johnson and her life as a Spring, I guess. Cooney is really good about bringing in specific details about objects to give the reader more of a visual, and even years later I think of Janie squashing her life into her newfound sister's room and the personalized 'Jennie' objects that her family has gotten for her (and that she doesn't want).
The ending of the book is not, I think, super realistic—again, I think Twice Taken had it more right there. But as a nostalgia read? This holds up.
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