Personal Rating: 2.5 Stars Goodreads Rating: 3.73 Stars Content Rating: PG-13 The face on the milk carton looks like an ordinary little girl: hair in tight pigtails, a dress with a narrow white collar, a three-year-old who was kidnapped more than twelve years ago from a shopping mall in New Jersey. As fifteen-year-old Janie Johnson stares at the milk carton, she feels overcome with shock. She knows that little girl is she. But how could it be true? Janie can't believe that her loving parents kidnapped her, until she begins to piece together clues that don't make sense. Why are there no pictures of Janie before she was four? Her parents have always said they didn't have a camera. Now that explanation sounds feeble. Something is terribly wrong, and Janie is afraid to find out what happened more than twelve years ago. (goodreads.com) Sometimes I wonder why I keep reading books by Caroline B. Cooney. As you may recall, I read and reviewed her book Driver’s Ed and I wasn’t really a fan. I’ve also read her book, Twenty Pageants Later, which I liked but not enough to review, and another one of her books, The Stranger, which was a peculiar book. After reading The Stranger, I decided that Ms. Cooney’s books weren’t really worth my time and I decided not to read any more of them. I was through with them! Finito! But… then I found a beat up, ratty old copy of The Face on the Milk Carton and I had a friend who’d read it and said it was good and I knew that the copy would be recycled and torn up if no one took it and, and, and… I took it home and read it. To be fair, it really held my interest and I was hooked enough that I couldn’t put it down because I really wanted to find out what happened. However, I can’t say that I was on the edge of my seat. I was expecting this to be a bit more thrilling than it was. Sadly, while the premise was fantastic and the course the plot eventually took was interesting, it was so angsty! I’m fine with a little angst, normally, but throughout the whole book Janie was just so emotional. Okay, okay, she has good reason to be, but when the whole book is just chapters and chapters of teenagers and their feelings, it gets old fast. The angst is the main reason I swore off Caroline B. Cooney in the first place. All of the books I’ve read by her are filled with super dramatic teenagers. Much of the time the drama is well deserved when you think about the things these kids are dealing with, but I am just not the kind of person who wants to read about a character agonizing over every detail of something bad that happened. I do enough of that in my own life, thank you, I don’t really want to read about made up people doing it as well. Like I said, the plot was interesting enough when Janie wasn’t bawling and her boyfriend (whose name I have forgotten—maybe it was Rake?) wasn’t complaining that she wouldn’t sleep with him. There are six books in this series and I read two of them, which is more than enough to know I don’t really want to continue. Also, if some of the angstiness had been left out of both books then they could have easily been one book. I would have much, much preferred it that way, actually and it wouldn’t have interrupted the flow of the story at all. It might have toned down some of the drama, but I would have been a-okay with that. The characters weren’t great either. As I mentioned previously, Janie is crying half the time and feeling like she wants to cry the other half. I can relate to that, but geesh! It is not fun to read about. I believe I also mentioned that her boyfriend is an idiot. Rake or Rafe or Ron or whatever his name was, is nice much of the time, but there are several instances where it seems like he is only helping Janie because he thinks once they clear up all the mystery then she’ll sleep with him. Like, dude, I think she has waaaaaaaay bigger issues to deal with at the moment. Leave her alone, you poop. I honestly don’t remember much about any of the other characters and what I can remember, I can’t tell you because it’s a bit of a spoiler. And that’s really all I have to say about the book. I don’t know if I’ll ever read another book by Caroline B. Cooney. I keep finding really old beat up copies of her books. I found Twenty Pageants Later at a used book sale and I found The Stranger in a bag full of worn out old paperbacks with the cover barely hanging on and now The Face on the Milk Carton in some books that were donated to one of the libraries I work at. If I find another one I’ll let you know, because, for some reason, I can’t resist reading them. Until the next book! Image source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19469.The_Face_on_the_Milk_Carton
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