Fiction Tuesday

No one ever really paid close attention to the faces of the missing children on the milk cartons. But as Janie Johnson glanced at the face of the ordinary little girl with her hair in tight pigtails, wearing a dress with a narrow white collar--a three-year-old who had been kidnapped twelve years before from a shopping mall in New Jersey--she felt overcome with shock. She recognized that little girl--it was she. How could it possibly be true?


Janie can't believe that her loving parents kidnapped her, but as she begins to piece things together, nothing makes sense. Something is terribly wrong. Are Mr. and Mrs. Johnson really Janie's parents? And if not, who is Janie Johnson, and what really happened?

“She and Reeve began a teasing verbal battle about how much worry he had caused her in his seventeen years, and was likely to cause in the next seventeen.”

—	Caroline Cooney, The Face on the Milk Carton

Caroline B. Cooney might have done it best with her book FACE ON A MILK CARTON. Perhaps you read it back in middle school. 

It wasn't long until the theme showed up in Lois Duncan's Stranger with my face. As well as Joan Lowry Nixon's The Other Side of Dark.

It looks like a mash-up of The Bourne Identity and The Face On The Milk Carton. I don’t know that that’s a good thing. - StrangeInk

It is a fascinating mystery that I'm sure we've thought about while growing up, wondering if we're in the wrong family. It is a storyline that does popup in many juvenile books. Like Avi's Nothing But the Truth and Running out of Time by Margret Peterson Haddix.

Cooney went on to make a series from THE FACE ON THE MILK CARTON with Whatever Happened to Janie, What Janie Found and Janie face to face. A Voice on the Radio is the finale of the series.

Now MTV has developed a new TV series, FINDING CARTER. The show stars SKINS Kathryn Prescott and THE FOSTERS' Alex Saxon. It starts tonight.

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