Cooney continues to focus on the un-winable situation Janie and her two families find themselves in. Sure, some parts seem really silly to me now at 26, but at 13 I wouldn’t have felt that way. What I’ve found in reading Janie Face to Face so far is that for the most part it feels like a natural continuation of the series I loved as a kid. I used to worry about it, but I’m used to it now, and I seem to present a normal façade to others.” My mind is populated with nonexistent teenagers. They may lie quietly, almost out of sight, or they may trundle along, having dialogues and conflicts and pizza. But some stay alive, occupying a mysterious layer of the heart and mind.

Most of them vanish from my thoughts when the book is complete.

I think my favorite part of the piece is when Cooney describes her writer’s mind: “I’ve written 91 novels. As Cooney describes it, “How much scarier then, if the kidnapper, bitter and desperate after staying in hiding so many years, decides to find Janie instead, and finish what she started when Janie was three – wrecking a life and two families.” They wanted the kidnapper to get hers.” So the book includes a wedding–but to whom?– and a more direct confrontation between Janie and Hannah than the near-miss in What Janie Found. She writes, “My readers had been demanding two plot lines for years: they wanted Janie and Reeve to get married. I was excited and curious about why Cooney would pick the series back up after all these years.Ĭooney addressed this question herself in a piece published in The Huffington Post, “Saying Goodbye.” She describes girls and her editor approaching her asking “whatever happened to Janie?” The Face on the Milk Carton was meant to stand alone, but Cooney says every few years a new plot would come to her.

Her Both Sides of Time series was one of my favorite things. I actually read more young adult literature now than I did as a teen, as I was an unbearable snob, but Caroline B. For many kids in the 1990’s* these books were a staple of their leisure reading. Cooney’s Janie Face to Face (released Jan 8th) comes 22 years after The Face on the Milk Carton and 12 years after the last book in the Janie Johnson Series, What Janie Found. I downloaded the book to my Kindle with embarrassing speed, as well as the 2012 short e-book What Janie Saw, and surreptitiously started reading in stolen moments before a weekend binge. A couple of days ago I was watching The Daily Show when getting ready to walk to campus and I saw a trailer for Janie Face to Face.

Janie face on the milk carton