That said… While I enjoyed Reeve most of the time, the rest of the characters in this series got a little (a lot) annoying by the end of Janie Face to Face. But, I still stand by my affinity for him. Now, nearly 20 years later, Reeve is a little less hunky and a little more dimwitted teenaged boy (you know what I mean). At 13, he was a HUNKY BOYFRIEND and I COULD NOT WAIT to get one of those. All I remembered about the book from my first reading decades ago was having major girl-crush on Reeve Shields. I remember reading The Face on the Milk Carton many, many moons ago, and got the entire, nostalgic five-part series this past Christmas. Even if that’s not actually true (though the part about it being published in 1990 is verifiable fact), I’m sticking by my fondness for The Face on the Milk Carton and its accompanying series. It’s a story we’ve all read - because it came out in 1990 and that was a hella long time ago, so you’ve had time to read it. But the more they participate, the stranger reality becomes. The Spring family participates in the book in an attempt to draw out Jennie’s kidnapper and finally get some justice. An author is writing a true-crime book on the Spring/Johnson kidnapping saga. But at what point does it become willful ignorance?įinally, in Janie Face to Face, Janie/Jennie is growing up, she’s dating, she’s getting married (spoiler alert: to Reeve!), she’s being stalked.

Sure, they didn’t actually kidnap her – that was their daughter, Hannah, though Miranda and Frank didn’t know that Janie wasn’t Hannah’s biological child. In What Janie Found, Janie/Jennie again has to grapple with understanding who her “kidnap parents” Miranda and Frank really are. In The Voice on the Radio, the adorable boy-next-door Reeve Shields turns out to be a bit of an 18-year-old dick, voicing Janie’s story across Boston airwaves as he makes a name for himself at his college radio station. Will she ever be able to make anyone happy? In Whatever Happened to Janie?, Janie/Jennie grapples with the idea of loving simultaneously her “kidnap family” in Connecticut and her “real family” in New Jersey. In The Face on the Milk Carton, Janie is faced with coming to terms with the possibility that the milk carton wasn’t lying and that she was, in fact, a girl named Jennie Spring who was kidnapped from a New Jersey mall when she was a toddler. And thus starts a whirlwind couple of years for Janie Johnson, aka Jennie Spring. Only they’re saying this three-year-old Janie was kidnapped. One day at lunch, Janie swipes someone’s cardboard milk carton (remember those?) and finds herself staring at the three-year-old version of herself. Janie Johnson was a normal, average, every day girl - until she wasn’t. It’s like I can’t go back and I can’t go forward.

The face on the milk carton book series